The film opens with an informal day-in-the-life-of-a-space-station but when you see the crew coo-ing over the apparently simple life form they have retrieved from a Mars probe and, in a very bad case of misguided anthropomorphism called it Calvin, you know that things are not going to last like this for long. Indeed the film doesn’t waste time before Calvin morphs into a very nasty piece of work and then it is just a question of will the crew kill Calvin before he kills them.
While I must admit I was struggling to follow the screenplay in places, especially the business about firewall protocols and the arrival of a Soyuz spaceship, the battle for survival is both tense and executed with technical flair in zero gravity with no weapons to speak of, giving the far-fetched scenario a good measure of credibility. To forestall any misgivings in this respect the sound design and Jon Ekstrand’s score add substantially to the visceral excitation.
The crew, played by Ryan Reynolds, Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, Ariyon Bakare, Olga Dihovichnaya and Hiroyuki Sanada are all well-individuated personalities distinguished not just by their cultural diversity but by small touches of characterization in a nicely-balanced script by writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (they wrote 2016’s Deadpool in which Reynolds starred). Whilst Life is very much an ensemble film, Gyllenhaal and Ferguson get the main dramatic action although mercifully not in service of a shipboard romance with Gyllenhaal whose character has been traumatized by his time as a soldier in the Middle East even managing to work in some of his trademark intensity.