9/10/2023 0 Comments Life movie review![]() I can’t help thinking of a quote James Cameron once used to describe his own space horror film, Aliens: “Forty miles of bad road. Superbly made and acted, Life is, in its strongest moments, properly scary. What the creature lacks in originality, however, it makes up for in resilience and sheer speed indeed, the same could be said of the film as a whole. Regrettably, the creature itself doesn’t scale the iconic heights of the Starbeast in Alien or the beefy presence of the big game hunter in Predator, partly because it’s brought to life with CGI rather than practically. Jon Eskrand’s music and some superb sound design adds to the building dread some strikingly committed performances also help sell the feeling that the crew of the USS are staring the unknown full in the face. Director Ang Lee brilliantly brings to screen this. Theres lots of violence and tense, scary. As Hugh prods and studies his newfound pet in a his quarantined lab, and his colleagues look on, wide-eyed through the protective glass, Espinosa ably builds up the tension, biding his time until, all of a sudden, the movie bites down and the pace shifts into something approaching full-on terror. Ever since its movie adaptation was announced, I was skeptical if such a tale could be put on celluloid. Parents need to know that Life is a sci-fi/horror movie about a killer alien creature loose on board a satellite. Life’s a far more complete-feeling, believable film than Child 44, his 2015 drama-thriller set behind the Iron Curtain. Technically, Espinosa’s work here is similarly assured. ![]() In this respect, Espinosa’s film feels more in the lineage of Alien than Prometheus did as the crew talk about their family life back home, or Ryan Reynolds cracks boisterous jokes, there’s the sense that these are real people in a real space station – all of which makes the moments of suspense click into place all the more satisfyingly. Ridley Scott’s Prometheus was a visual feast, yet its characters bore all the intelligence and logic of a bunch of school kids on a field trip. 86 Cinema Sabaya 77 Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman 67 Horseplay - Jurassic Shark 3: Seavenge - Moon Students - Hi-Fear - How Do You Measure a Year - Matter Out of Place 75 Jagged Mind. It’s this latter point that makes Life work so well from a dramatic perspective. Life immediately sets itself apart from the space horror pack by grounding its events in present-day reality the crew of the USS float about in zero G their muscles have atrophied from months in space and above all, there’s a pleasing sense that these characters have spent months together in close proximity. There’s suspense, there are moments to make you gag, and just when you think you know where the story’s going, Espinosa and writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick take some pleasingly unexpected turns. From familiar-sounding material, director Daniel Espinosa ( Easy Money, Safe House) crafts a stylish, white-knuckle space thriller.
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