‘Life’ shows in space, everyone can hear you scream

That’s when the movie zaps to life too. While the drama and spaces within the station are well designed and filmed, the story is just silly as the crewmembers make one poor decision after another and seem unable to overcome a solitary predator. But I’m not a big horror fan.

Stationed on the International Space Station, Mars 7, the plot follows a group of multinational co-ed astronauts, led by Hugh Derry (Ariyon Bakare).

It’s a bit early still, but I’d like to make a prediction: In the tradition of NY and Los Angeles getting engulfed by flame and flood and nuclear winter, the International Space Station is the next outpost of human civilization we’ll see habitually demolished onscreen, over and over again. Even this close to home, no one can hear you scream.

In this floating environment, an global crew of six astronauts has been tasked with retrieving soil samples collected from the planet Mars, in the not-too-distant future.

The crew is even more excited when a single living microscopic cell is discovered in the samples. In a vacuum it gets a higher recommendation – in the real world, you’re better off just watching Alien – but if you’re in need of a new monster-in-space movie, Life will scratch that itch.

We’ve definitely seen movies like this before, but again, it’s not what you say but how you say it. Life was written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, the genius scribes behind Deadpool, and just like that movie, they took a familiar genre and concept and turned it on its head. It starts with the simple white sans-serif title font, kerned out so there’s about a parsec between each letter and the next.

The first half or so of Life is full of exposition and room for character development. And for variety, there’s a lift from 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which faulty comms require one of the astronauts to venture outside for repairs. The emotion is further supported by a score that remains subtle and understated at numerous films narrative moments, but rises to a rousing crescendo when needed that does a superb job of keeping you drawn to your seats.

To make the movie as realistic as possible, the filmmakers turned to experts like geneticist Adam Rutherford and Kevin Fong, a doctor and astrophysicist who’s worked with NASA on understanding human adaptation to space. Hugh, desperate to interact with it more, decides to subject it to a low-voltage electric current. Till then it was all rosy with each member getting along with the other and Ryan Reynolds playing his favourite side-kick role. And Dihovichnaya delivers maxims – “slow is fast” – that ring true in cinema as well as space exploration. Swedish composer Jon Ekstrand wrote the music.

Thankfully, it does it with a huge dollop of claustrophobia and careful storytelling, and Alien is still one of the best films ever made, so while this is the kid brother of Scott’s masterpiece, don’t hold that against it. Siblings are OK.

Before Calvin takes centrestage, most of the film feels like a documentary on life at the International Space Station, wherein the terrestrial humans’ curiosity about the eating, sleeping, exercising and defecating habits of astronauts is addressed.

Ah, but that ending. How it shakes out … is for you to see and find out. His thriller “Snabba Cash (Easy Money)” was the No. 1 film in Sweden the year it came out.

Life is a box of chocolates, a highway and, alas, a mediocre science-fiction thriller.