In Space, No One Can Hear You Squirm...

                     

When I saw the trailer, my first words to Sian were something like "I've seen this film a hundred times - I'm not interested." The plot: a team of scientists aboard a space station in orbit discover a microscopic alien life form, which soon turns nasty and starts killing them all one-by-one in a gory fashion. It doesn't reek of originality, but then what film does these days? 

But after being drawn to the luxury of an air-conditioned cinema multiplex (see my next post) whilst otherwise suffocated by the intense humidity and smog of Bangkok, I thought I'd give it a go. Besides, there was nothing out that I hadn't already seen. That, and being something of a Ryan Reynolds fan and apparently thinking the film looked good, Sian twisted my arm (literally). But during the film, we also crushed each other's hands a few times like a pair of needy Facehuggers... 

Ryan Reynolds, Jake Gyllenhaal and Rebecca Ferguson play scientists aboard the International Space Station where, along with their team, they are studying a microscopic martian life form that they decide to nickname "Calvin." But it doesn't take long before they realise they've underestimated the organism, when it begins to grow rapidly in size and viciously attacks one of them, leading to its escape from its lab prison and into the station's ventilation system. Sound familiar? There's no denying that Life is a carbon copy of 1979's Alien, but the difference is that this copy came out a little bit sharper...

There's also no denying the brilliance of Alien and how it was unknowingly ready to give birth to an entire franchise at the time, but somehow Life's "Calvin" gives cinema's most terrifying monster, the infamous "xenomorph", a run for its money, quickly becoming the most evil and powerful (and bastardy) alien to have crawled across the dark parts of the silver screen ever since. There are some other deliberate similarities here too (treat the upcoming spoiler like a Facehugger itself and turn your head away now...), with the most famous star in the film, Ryan Reynolds, serving as the one who gets very badly John Hurt (if of course you get the reference), by way of telling the viewer that no one in the film is safe. Then there's the fact the characters try to search for the alien while it's searching for them, with a mission that outweighs that of their desire to survive: don't let it get to Earth. And it's the latter that raises the stakes astronomically high, making the suspense, tension and atmosphere (or lack of) solid, and proving that film is not about originality, but execution. 

A white-knuckle sci-fi horror with an antagonist cunning and cold enough to keep Alien fans' hearts from bursting out of their chests until Alien: Covenant lands on Earth this May.