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Life Is a Familiar Alien Horror Story That Pays Off

Life is grueling. Life is hard. Life is surprisingly beautiful in moments, and not just because Jake Gyllenhaal is in it. Life is bleak, Life is sad. Life is full of body-horror that is really tough to bear. Life , like life, is a lot of painful things. But it’s still a good trip.

Apologies for leaning too heavily on the grand vagueness of Life ’s title. It’s just so overwrought and encompassing. But otherwise, Daniel Espinosa’s film—an Alien homage, written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, that justifies its redundancy—is unexpectedly sharp and arresting, a murmur of pathos and intellect rippling underneath all its grinding space-horror. The film’s got something on its mind, not just something wriggling around inside its body.

In a time that seems not too distant from ours—the Challenger explosion is referenced, for example—an international team of astronauts eagerly awaits the return of a soil sample from Mars, delivered by an unmanned probe that will soon arrive at their space station with its bounty. The scientists on board hope that they can extract some organic matter from the sample and, perhaps, synthesize or restore a living organism, in order to prove that we are not alone in this terrible and tumbling universe.

Reader, will it shock you to find out that they do? And that said entity turns out to be quite a bit more sinister than initially thought? Probably not. This is familiar narrative DNA. But, rather refreshingly, the film finds new angles of approach, or at least ones that aren’t too well worn, reshaping huge chunks of Alien and sizable portions of Gravity to form something bracing and scary and interesting, a B-movie with brains. Especially in its ominous and oddly lovely opening minutes, Espinosa and the brilliant cinematographer Seamus McGarvey give the film a stately, haunting mien, Jon Ekstrand’s lush and bombastic score setting the stage for something big. If the subsequent film doesn’t quite live up to that beginning, Reese and Wernick’s script still stays tight and convincing throughout, even when—maybe especially when, actually—it pauses for reflective, emotional beats.

The cast deftly sells it. Gyllenhaal does yet another appealing, recessive turn as a sad-sack doctor who’s been up in space longer than anybody else. (Please go see him as sad-sack painter in Sunday in the Park with George on Broadway if you can—he’s terrific.) He’s well matched by a steely Rebecca Ferguson as a C.D.C. emissary tasked with keeping whatever foreign entity the scientists are able to revive in strict quarantine. (She, uh, fails.) The rest of the crew is played by the great Hiroyuki Sanada, British standout Ariyon Bakare (he plays the curious biologist who’s kinda to blame for the whole thing), Olga Dihovichnaya (who looks so much like Gina McKee it’s a little unnerving), and Ryan Reynolds as a cocky mechanic, because what else would Ryan Reynolds play in this movie. They form a credible team, possessed of an easy camaraderie and actually seeming like smart, capable professionals—despite the deadly screw-ups, that is.

The last member of the cast is my least favorite. He plays Calvin, the shape-shifting alien creature that comes alive and starts killing everybody. (If that’s a spoiler, welcome to Earth!) Deftly animated and given voice by some hideously, squishingly believable foley work, this skittering thing is deeply unpleasant to behold if you’re any sort of bug-phobe. (It doesn’t really look like a bug, but its movements keenly evoke one—until it sorta morphs into an octopus, anyway.) And its method of murder is particularly gruesome, though it begins to lose its potency the more the film bends the rules of the alien’s physics. Ah well. For the most part, it’s a grimly effective performance, hard to watch as it may be.

A lot of Life is difficult going if you’re averse to bugs, body stuff, claustrophobia, the punishing inhospitality of space, etc. But Espinosa’s artful touch tempers that discomfort. Life is tense and unnerving and a total bummer. But it’s still worth it. And no, I don’t know if I’m talking about Life or life anymore either.

Richard Lawson

Chief critic.

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Life : EW review

As much as it wants to be, the new deep-space thriller Life is no Alien . Then again, what is? What could be? When Ridley Scott directed his 1979 no one-can-hear-you-scream masterpiece, there were still rules to break and boundaries to push. He giddily broke and pushed all of them, combining what were dismissed as two distinct and disreputable gutter genres (science fiction and horror) and fusing them into one glorious chest-bursting hybrid. You could be intelligent and graphically gooey at the same time. Who knew? In fact, it was possible that by doing so you could even approach something like art . Life doesn’t aspire to be art. Which is fine. Not everything has to. I only bring up Alien because that’s how the movie is being sold. Still, if you lower your sights a few pegs and go in looking for a solid, tight B-movie that builds right until the final shot, there’s a lot to like.

Life tracks the fates of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station. They’re making a pitstop on their way home from Mars, where they found microscopic evidence of single-cell life forms, and they’ve got the history-making specimens with them. Director Daniel Espinosa ( Safe House , Child 44 ) gets off to a somewhat muddled start, fumbling what could have been a concise table-setting tour of the spacecraft, but instead he turns it into a murky maze. We never really know where we are. All we know is that it’s dark and as cramped and claustrophobic as a casket, which is essentially what we know it will become over the next hour and a half. The introduction of the crew and their gumbo of accents is only slight more coherent: There’s Rebecca Ferguson ( Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation ) as the no-nonsense rep from the Centers for Disease Control; Jake Gyllenhaal as the slightly depressive chief medical officer; Ryan Reynolds as (what else?) the wisecracking scientist tossing off Re-Animator references; Ariyon Bakare ( Jupiter Ascending ) as the ship’s exobiologist with withered CG legs (which seems like a very pricey method of character building); Russian actress Olga Dihovichnaya as a Boris-and-Natasha-sounding cosmonaut; and Hiroyuki Sanada ( The Wolverine ) as a Japanese engineer and proud father of a newborn back on Earth.

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Espinosa and his screenwriters, Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (the team behind Deadpool ), don’t make us care about the crewmembers as much as they probably think they do. But they more than make up for it as soon as Bakare zaps the Martian amoeba to dancing life. That’s when the movie zaps to life too. Suddenly, there’s a seventh member onboard. They name it “Calvin.” And it’s growing fast. It’s also adaptive and intelligent and aggressive. But Bakare’s scientist is too smitten with his new discovery to absorb any of this until it crushes his hand like a walnut in a vise and breaks loose, squishily scampering through the ducts and vents. What was once minuscule and harmless is now as big as an octopus, as transparent as jellyfish, and as fast as a cockroach when the lights come on. No one onboard knows what they’re dealing with and how deadly it might be. They just know that they’re trapped in a tight space with something very, very angry.

It’s not giving anything away to say that from this point on, Life is basically a zero-gravity bodycount flick — And Then There Were None in space. The crew tries every way it can to kill the thing, but Calvin won’t die. I kept waiting for Jeff Goldblum to show up on their communication screen to say, “Life…uh…finds a way.” Espinosa stages some clever scares and creative kills while the crew make one bone-headed decision after another in their bid to survive (they have a particular knack for opening hatches when they should stay closed). Then again, watching smart people make dumb choices is one of cinema’s deepest pleasures. Life isn’t a great movie (in fact, it’s kind of a mess). But it is a really fun one. Somehow it manages to keep pushing enough joy-buzzer buttons to keep the audience on edge until the last scene. If it feels like Life succeeds in spite of itself, the important thing is that it succeeds. B+

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‘Here’ Review: Robert Zemeckis Turns Back the Clock on Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, and It Ain’t Pretty

The 'Forrest Gump' co-stars reunite for the boundary-pushing director's latest high-concept experiment, in which appalling de-aging technology distracts from what matters.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

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In Hollywood, most movies tell stories. But not “ Here .”

Adapted from a conceptual graphic novel by Richard McGuire where the perspective is the same on every page — the living room of a century-old American house — while rectangle-shaped panels within each frame reveal actions from different years, if not entirely separate epochs, “Here” is about an idea.

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For Zemeckis, the question isn’t how many existential truths he can squeeze into (or out of) a traditional New England living room, but whether he can get away with manipulating his actors’ on-screen ages across more than half a century. Technically, that is now possible, although the results look anything but natural, adding yet another distancing device to the already confusing assortment of events.

From “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” to “The Polar Express,” Zemeckis’ superpower has always been his pioneering spirit, while his kryptonite is a penchant for unearned sentimentality. “Here” fits that pattern to a tee, as Zemeckis dedicates his energy not to crafting fully dimensional characters, but to advancing the sort of “digital makeup” Martin Scorsese used to youthen the cast of “The Irishman,” effectively draining the project of the very thing he set out to celebrate: life.

It’s hard not to be reminded of “The Tree of Life” in this moment: There, Terrence Malick contemplated how lives that feel so important to those who experience them can seem inconsequential in the context of creation, dinosaurs and the sheer enormity of time. McGuire attempted something comparably radical in his book, expanding the comics form in the process. In lieu of telling a sequential story, he collapsed various time periods into a single scene, allowing total strangers to echo one another’s thoughts and deeds within a shared space.

Most “Here” viewers won’t have been exposed to McGuire’s graphic novel, and even those who were will find Zemeckis and Roth to be using a different strategy. In the film, it’s less about seeking unexpected connections than engineering clever transitions, while they try to align the arcs of multiple generations. Their goal is simple: to help make logical sense of an intricately nonlinear assortment of scenes. And yet, the overlapping-frames strategy tends to blur the lines between the various families involved, trapping us in a CG snowglobe, as virtual seasons change and time marches past the wide bay window. While our outward view is limited to the colonial mansion across the street, so many of the characters’ dreams lay beyond these walls.

John and Pauline Harter (played by Gwilym Lee and Michelle Dockery) are the first couple to occupy the house, which is shown being constructed in 1907. Pauline is constantly fretting over her head-in-the-clouds husband, a reckless aviator she’s afraid will one day crash. Without giving away this early-20th-century family’s fate, it should be said that worrying serves no purpose in “Here.” In fact, it can be punished in ironic ways, as if to show that obsessing over the future is the surest way to miss out on the present.

That attitude extends to Hanks’ anxious character, Richard Young, who gives up a painting career to provide for his family. Little Richie is not yet born when his dad Al (Paul Bettany) and three-months-pregnant mom Rose (Kelly Reilly) agree to buy the two-story house for a whopping $3,400 in 1945. It won’t change hands again for another 60 years, making the Young family and their three kids the people we see most, whereas the African Americans who buy it from them and the Native tribe that lived there long ago feel largely symbolic — the dramatic equivalent of an Indigenous land acknowledgment.

When Hanks first appears, digitally de-aged to look like he did in his “Bosom Buddies” days, it gives some focus to what can feel like an endless PowerPoint presentation. When he introduces his teenage girlfriend Margaret (Wright) a few scenes later, their movie-star status is a clue that we should be paying attention — not to the horrendous-looking face replacement technology, which looks more like hi-def Sims than the actors’ younger selves, but to these two characters.

Zemeckis gives everything a slightly corny, Currier and Ives-like feel (especially in several Colonial-era vignettes, when Ben Franklin features), as if he’s competing with vintage Saturday Evening Post covers to capture a typical American family. But the spot where he’s chosen to place his static camera — at a slight angle, couch facing the screen — suggests a far more ubiquitous visual reference: that of the classic sitcom.

The blocking constantly reinforces that model, and because Zemeckis doesn’t cut or go in for close-ups, he obliges his actors to approach the lens anytime he wants us to see their faces. Ninety-four minutes in, the director finally opts to unfreeze his camera, swiveling around to observe a key moment between two characters. Had Zemeckis built “Here” as a museum installation instead of a film, the fixed POV probably would have made sense. But we’ve come to be moved, and for that to work, the camera should too.

Reviewed at AFI Fest, Oct. 25, 2024. MPA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 104 MIN.

• Production: A Sony release of a Tristar Pictures, Miramax presentation of a Miramax, Imagemovers production. Producers: Robert Zemeckis, Derek Hogue, Jack Rapke, Bill Block. Executive producers: Jeremy Johns, Andrew Golov, Thom Zadra.
• Crew: Director: Robert Zemeckis. Screenplay: Eric Roth & Robert Zemeckis, based on the graphic novel by Richard McGuire. Camera: Don Burgess. Editor: Jesse Goldsmith. Music: Alan Silvestri.
• With: Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Paul Bettany, Kelly Reilly.

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The Dutch director Anton Corbijn is especially, if not uniquely, qualified to offer insight on the theme of the photographer and his or her subject. Before he began his motion-picture directing career with 2007’s “ Control ,” Corbijn was a meticulous and well-respected still photographer who shot some of the arts’ most enigmatic and intriguing figures, including Captain Beefheart, Bjork, Miles Davis , Robert De Niro , Peter Hammill, U2 (that’s Corbijn’s imagery on the group’s “The Joshua Tree” album), Gary Lucas, and many others. The aforementioned “Control” was a sensitive and bracingly unconventional account of the life of Ian Curtis, the Joy Division singer who was, among other things, a major inspiration to Corbijn.

Corbijn’s “Life” is his fourth feature picture and in a sense his most ambitious, tackling the still highly mythologized and idolized 1950s film acting sensation James Dean , focusing on a few weeks before the 1955 film “East of Eden” premiered and made him into a particularly combustible superstar practically overnight. “Life” tells the story of Dean and Dennis Stock, an ambitious photographer working freelance for the late, lamented, large-format photocentric print magazine Life (hence the movie’s double-meaning title). The future icon is played by Dane DeHaan , while Stock is played by the bigger contemporary star Robert Pattinson . The two meet almost-cute at a Hollywood party at director Nicholas Ray ’s house; Ray is considering Dean for a part in his next film, while Stock is looking for work away from the red carpet. Stock spots a t-shirted Dean trying to be invisible at the pool bar; the two start exchanging lines and for a good portion thereafter their exchanges look like a form of flirtation.

What we really have, as it turns out, is two lost souls living in a fishbowl not of their making, and kind of wondering why they’re there, and how they’re gonna get out of it. DeHaan plays Dean as a kind of haunted smart-aleck, deigning to take nothing too seriously but generally regarding the world as a bully that’s taken away his puppy at the same time. In an interview promoting “East of Eden” he idly disparages a Western that later turns out to have been a big hit for the studio head Jack Warner (played as a courtly thug by Ben Kingsley ), who subsequently advises Dean that if he wants a career he needs to begin behaving in a more “intelligent” fashion. Stock, meanwhile, makes okay money working with fellows he calls the “red carpet gorillas,” but wants to make art of his own, and sees Dean as the ideal subject for a photo essay. And so the two form an uneasy alliance, trekking to New York and then to Dean’s home in Indiana to capture some unstaged moments in … life.

And, yes, the real-life photographer Stock took the real-life still of Dean with his overcoat collar up, strolling through a deserted Times Square at sun-up. One of the most reproduced photographs of the post-war period, Wikipedia calls it, and I’ve no reason to doubt them. But Corbijn’s movie is not as much about image-making as you might expect, and to be frank, the movie’s limited means of production don’t provide Corbijn with the opportunity of restaging that shot with pinpoint accuracy. The movie is, rather, about different forms of ambition, and the way that ambition can be self-defeating. “ He can’t get out of his own way, ” Dean confides (he thinks) to a family member of Stock during their Indiana sojourn. Pattinson is, as it happens, very good at playing needy, and he succeeds beautifully in making his character sympathetic without being particularly likable. (In this film, Stock’s back story has him becoming a father at a potentially ruinously young age; here, he’s portrayed as relating to his seven-year-old kid as kind of an alien—it’s rare to see a movie nowadays that depicts poor fathering skills so matter-of-factly.)

Corbijn, as has been his custom in directing features, goes for mood and feel rather than narrative momentum, although his scope is clearly hemmed-in by the production’s budget; there’s not much here in the way of effective ‘50s-New-York evocation. But the actors and their exchanges ring true, and by the time the film reaches its lonesome conclusion, the resonances are eerie. Dean will go on to become a legend, almost literally, given that his next two films, “Rebel Without A Cause” and “Giant,” both American cinematic monuments, were released posthumously. And Stock will live a long and successful life as a photographer, his stills of Dean giving us what would turn out to be rare glimpses into the person behind the screen icon. Life can be awfully odd sometimes.

Glenn Kenny

Glenn Kenny was the chief film critic of Premiere magazine for almost half of its existence. He has written for a host of other publications and resides in Brooklyn. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

• Peter Lucas as Nicholas Ray
• Lauren Gallagher as Natalie Wood
• Joel Edgerton as John Morris
• Kristian Bruun as Roger Love
• Robert Pattinson as Dennis Stock
• Dane DeHaan as James Dean
• Ben Kingsley as Jack Warner
• Kelly McCreary as Eartha Kitt
• Anton Corbijn

Cinematography

• Charlotte Bruus Christensen
• Luke Davies
• Nick Fenton
• Owen Pallett

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