It isn’t nuanced, but it’s welcome as it at least gives us something to latch onto. Ryan Reynolds in particular is barely required to do anything more than put on a spacesuit and reprise his BT ad persona. This is where casting familiar faces helps. Of the crew members, only Pluto has less depth than her. It means certain characters are thinly drawn, commander Dihovichnaya (Katerina Golovkin) especially suffering. Ridley Scott took over 50 minutes to introduce us to his crew before the alien burst out of John Hurt’s chest, here all hell breaks loose in under half an hour. A couple of shots of the Mars probe flying through space, a (six minute 36 second) tracking shot (with hidden cuts) as the crew attempt to catch it after it’s knocked off course, and then that’s it - the organism is on board. Where the film differs to Alien is in its set-up. It’s clear the film that Life is most indebted to is the original Alien. They may be hunting Calvin, but it’s hunting them too. But that’s easier said than done - it’s impervious to flame, able to survive in the vacuum of space, and getting stronger all the time. After the first attack the mission changes: it’s no longer a creature for study, but one to isolate and destroy. That squid, dubbed ‘Calvin’, starts off as a single-celled organism, but soon begins growing and suddenly becomes hostile to the human crew. But, just seven weeks before a new Alien film is released, it’s clear the film it’s most indebted to is the 1979 original – the ISS taking the place of Nostromo, and a gelatinous space squid substituting for the Xenomorph. The ISS’s low space orbit and the crew’s zero-G manoeuvres unavoidably bring Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity to mind. There’s a lot that’s familiar about sci-fi horror Life. It’s hardly a spoiler to reveal that they do not all make it. There are seven crewmates aboard the International Space Station as the film beings - six humans and one rat, Pluto. It soon becomes apparent exactly how well-equipped, and at everyone else’s expense. “The creature as a whole is in a very real sense all muscle, all brain, all eye,” announces Rebecca Ferguson’s Dr Miranda North about the miniature alien her crew have found, marvelling at how biologically well-equipped it is.
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