A New Take on Martians: LIFE (2017) Review (SPOILERS)

The poster to the awesome movie LIFE.

    

   (Please note before reading: Serious SPOILERS ahead! If you don't want the movie spoiled and haven't seen it, please don't continue reading! This movie is a MUST-SEE! I loved every minute.) 

   Daniel Espinosa directed the new sci-fi horror film LIFE, a film with many rumors attached to it. People were expecting a rehash of 1979's ALIEN, but what we got was something really different and unique. "We were better off alone," says the film's tagline, and there's nothing that can better summarize the terror this movie brings. The atmosphere, effects, and score all work together to make a sensational film.
   LIFE tells the story of a group of astronauts aboard the International Space Station. The cast is a great one. They are as follows:

• Jake Gyllenhaal as Dr. David Jordan, USA, ISS medical officer
• Rebecca Ferguson as Dr. Miranda North, UK, CDC quarantine officer
• Ryan Ryenolds as Rory Adams, USA, ISS flight engineer
  
• Hiroyuki Sanada as Sho Murakami, Japan, ISS systems engineer
  
• Ariyon Bakare as Dr. Hugh Derry, UK, ISS exobiologist
• Olga Dykhovichnaya as Ekaterina Golovkina, Russia, ISS Mission Commander

We have discovered in Martian soil from a returning space probe a microscopic life-form, like a protozoan. A simple, single-celled organism. With proof of life on Mars finally found, the world rejoices!  The news spreads incredibly quickly, and there's a huge ceremony early on in the movie where the Martian life-form is given a name by the children of a winning school: Calvin! The world is excited to begin studying Calvin, which at this time appears to be a tiny bacterium. They take precautionary measures though, keeping the alien cell in a sealed container in a sealed lab aboard the ISS. When introduced to Earth-like oxygen levels, Calvin begins to stir, and he quickly begins to grow and change, while the astronauts record and observe it, excited to interact with it but also wary of it. Hugh Derry is the first to interact with it.

The bloblike Calvin reaches out to interact with its human captors in LIFE.

   Calvin continues to grow and change, from a formless blob of cellular mass, to a strange, almost starfish-like creature with leaf-like arms. The CGI used to portray Calvin in the movie is very consistent. In fact, all of it is. The effects are very convincing, and not only that, the portrayal of zero gravity is also very convincing. It almost seems at times like they really did shoot in space, even though they didn't. Unfortunately, there's an accident in the lab early in the film, and Calvin goes dormant. Disappointed, Dr. Hugh Derry tries to revive him with a small electric prod. This results in the revived Calvin to become hostile, and he attacks his handler, and uses the electric prod to escape his enclosure. It attacks a lab rat viciously and grows in size. This is where the movie really gets going.

Calvin grows larger and becomes more dangerous.

   Calvin becomes even more dangerous and starts brutally killing people. Rory Adams is sent in to help get Calvin off of Dr. Derry, and the alien eventually breaks his arm. The rest of the film focuses on the team's efforts to stop Calvin from escaping, and survive his vicious attacks. Calvin goes into Adams through his mouth and kills him by destroying his internal organs from the inside. He then escapes the lab through the ventilation systems. Calvin continues to grow and change, pursuing the people aboard the ISS relentlessly. Meanwhile, the communications systems overheated, and there's no way to warn Earth of the impending danger Calvin poses. When one of the astronauts, Ekaterina Golovkina tries to fix the communications system from outside, Calvin gets into her spacesuit and ruptures the coolant systems, causing her helmet to fill with the toxic liquid. She tries to prevent him from getting back into the space station, but the clever alien gets in anyways, leaving her to drown. Calvin heads towards the thrusters, and after a failed attempt to blast him into outer space, which sends the ISS on a closer orbit to Earth, which would end with the station burning up in the atmosphere, he gets back in to continue spreading terror. By now, Calvin is nearly unrecognizable from his original state. He looks like a strange, tentacled beast that 'swims' through the zero gravity. Meanwhile Earth, having received a distress signal prior to the communication systems going down, sends a space capsule rocketing towards the space station in an effort to prevent it from going in-atmosphere. The crew mistakes this for a rescue attempt, with Sho Murakami trying to get to it. The crew tries to save Sho, but he is doomed as Calvin destroys him and the crew aboard the space capsule.

Calvin attacks!

   With the ISS still on a dangerous course for Earth and most of the crew dead, the last two astronauts put together a desperate plan to stop Calvin from reaching Earth: The two of them will each go into a separate escape pod. One will have David in it, who will lure Calvin into it before sending the pod out to deep space. And the other will bring the last astronaut, Miranda, safely to Earth. David succeeds in luring Calvin into his pod and the two launch together. The finale of this movie ends with a GREAT twist that I won't spoil for those who haven't seen it, simply because I never saw it coming. I will say, that it kills off the rumors of this being a secret prequel to Venom, as this creature is definitely NOT the symbiote.

Calvin's final form in the movie is chilling and really unique.

    This movie was great from beginning to end. It was really fresh, as it wasn't a sequel or a prequel or related to any other franchise, despite rumors of it being connected to Sony's Venom movie, and I really enjoyed it. Anyone who enjoyed ALIEN, or really any other sci-fi horror I think will appreciate this movie. LIFE was a solid entry in the space-horror genre, a really great movie that was unlike most horror movies I've seen. The effects are awesome, the stunts are wonderful, the acting really sells the drama and fear, and Jon Ekstrand provides a chilling score as well. One of my favorites I've seen for 2017. Definitely a must-see. If you dismissed LIFE as yet another ALIEN knock-off, give it a watch.