Life (2017)

There's a moment early in Life where the crew of the International Space Station are watching a single-celled Martian organism respond to stimulus for the first time, and the whole thing feels genuinely wondrous. You're leaning forward. You're thinking: this could be something special. And then, slowly, you realise the film has no idea what to do with that feeling.

The premise is a cracker. A sample returned from Mars contains the first confirmed evidence of extraterrestrial life, a microscopic organism that the crew name Calvin, which grows, adapts and turns out to be very much not the friendly little ambassador humanity was hoping for. It's Alien meets The Thing, essentially, and I want to be clear: that is not a criticism in itself. Standing on the shoulders of giants is fine, as long as you've got something to say once you're up there. Life gets up there and just sort of... shrugs.

Ryan Reynolds does his Ryan Reynolds thing, sarcasm dialled back a notch or two, which works well enough in the early going. Jake Gyllenhaal is the emotional centre of the film, playing the ship's doctor as a man already fraying at the edges before Calvin starts making things considerably worse, and he's genuinely good. Watchable, twitchy, quietly sad. Rebecca Ferguson holds the whole ensemble together with the kind of controlled, steely performance she makes look effortless. The cast deserve better material, and the frustrating thing is that you can see them trying to make it work anyway.

Visually, the film is impressive. The zero-gravity effects feel convincing rather than showy, the ISS interiors are claustrophobically believable, and the early sequences, all hushed awe and careful scientific procedure, build a real sense of dread. The cinematography is slick and confident. On a craft level, there's plenty to admire.

But here's the problem. Once Calvin stops being a curiosity and starts being a threat, Life locks itself into a template it never breaks free of. Containment breach. Crew member down. Regroup. Another containment breach. Repeat until credits. Each beat arrives more or less exactly when you expect it to, and the twists that are supposed to jolt you into attention are telegraphed so heavily that they land with a dull thud rather than a shock. The final act in particular leans on genre conventions so hard that by the time it reaches its conclusion, you're nodding along rather than holding your breath.

It's not bad, and I want to be fair about that. Life is competently made, consistently watchable, and genuinely tense in patches. There are sequences that work. Calvin itself is a well-designed creature, unsettling in the right ways. But competence isn't the same as memorability, and for all the talent assembled both in front of and behind the camera, the film never generates anything close to the stomach-dropping dread of the classics it's drawing from. It's the cinematic equivalent of a perfectly decent meal you've completely forgotten by the following morning.

Gyllenhaal in particular deserved a script that matched his commitment. I've seen what he can do in something like Prisoners, where the emotional weight of a performance is given proper room to breathe and build, and watching him work hard here against thin material is quietly frustrating.

Two and a half stars. Worth a watch on a quiet evening if you want something tight and dark and set in space, but don't go in expecting to be shaken. In space, no one can hear you being forgettable.

Rating: ★★½  | Year: 2017  | Watched: 2025-09-23

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Sony Pictures Core Amazon Channel
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Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Stream: Hulu
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