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Life Will Find A Way [Review: Life]

The crew of the International Space Station retrieve a capsule from Mars, completing a sample return mission and bringing a small quantity of soil into their orbital laboratory. The sample contains what appears to be Martian microbes - but are they dead or can they be revived? And should they?


Life is at heart a surprisingly traditional creature feature, perhaps even a tribute to classic films such as Alien, The Blob or even Roger Corman's Little Shop Of Horrors. There's a creature who grows in power and intelligence as it hunts down the humans who had the hubris to summon it into existence. The only truly original aspect of this movie is the setting, with the ISS re-imagined as the perfect modern-day haunted house - labyrinthine, claustrophobic, vulnerable and disorientating due to zero-gravity. The creature is also well-designed, developing from scene to scene like a Martian Audrey Two, and it definitely feels alien, although there's little attempt to explain its biology or evolution.

The only missing cliche is the kid who nobody believes when he tries to warn them - but since the Thermal Curtain Failure debacle of 1986 and subsequent abandonment of the Jinx robotics programme I don't think we're going to see any more children in low Earth orbit for some time. So instead we have to make do with the somewhat childish medical officer David, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, and the excellent multi-ethnic cast playing his fellow astronauts and cosmonauts, led by Olga Dihovichnaya as the station's Russian commander.

I enjoyed the thrills, shocks and clever moments of this movie, and I think it was well casted and acted, with a great setting. The ending is a bit predictable but I'll let that go for now. I would still recommend it to horror fans. It's a little gory in places so other cinemagoers may wish to exercise caution. This is however a popcorn movie - other than the themes of hubris, bravery and self-sacrifice common to the genre it's not really about anything and doesn't have anything particularly profound to say.

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