So you get 6 people in the ISS-like can in orbit around the blue pearl in the vastness of space that we call home. You get Ryan Reynolds as Rory Adams, Ariyon Bakare as Hugh Derry, Olga Dihovichnaya as Ekaterina Golovkina, Jake Gyllenhaal as David Jordan, Hiroyuki Sanada as Sho Murakami and lastly Rebecca Ferguson as Miranda North. They're an international team of astronauts that get to catch a vehicle returning from MARS that has valuable soil samples from MARS upon it.
Bakare's Hugh Derry is the one with the task of trying to resucitate a long dead single cell organism that they find amoung the samples. It isn't simple, but once it is alive - well... First non-Earth LIFE in history. The world celebrates, kids name the life CALVIN - and well... Nobody on the space station is going to love Calvin all that much. Oh sure, at first, it's just like Malcolm taught us in JURASSIC PARK, there's ewwwws and ahhhhhs and then there's running and blood and screams and a whole heaping dose of PAIN!
Let's face it, we've all seen the trailers for this, and you know it is a MONSTER IN A CAN movie - and if you want to see all these people I've listed above meet their Final Destinations - then yeah, you're going to get an eyeful, but you're not going to get innovative plot work, nor will you get dialogue that'll rest with you so long as you walk this Earth.
So how's CALVIN? The critter is pretty to look at, unless it is digesting a rat. But as it swims around the space station, it's hypnotic - can't take my eyes off of it. The way it fucks people up is brutal as hell - and they're all really rather fucked. The key purpose of this film seems to give us a worst case scenario for a new lifeform on the spacestation. I'd recommend that we have a LAUNCH THE ALIEN LIFEFORM LAB DIRECTLY INTO THE SUN protocol.
You've probably seen HUGH's hand trauma, but there's a lot of trauma here. BUT - I wouldn't say you love any of the characters so much that seeing Calvin making them non-lifeforms hurts. As for the Survivors... well, you'll see.
LIFE is a B-movie. You won't come out thinking you've seen the best of a genre that we all know and love. But you might go over what you would do in their situation - but really, CALVIN was designed to basically fuck up everything you would think would be a smart thing to do. Cuz once an Alien people killing critter gets into ducts - everyone is always fucked in these kinds of film.
SO - is the movie fun? Absolutely. it works like a FINAL DESTINATION film with a better cast and with consistently cooler effects, though the deaths aren't nearly as funny or Rube Goldberg as that film. In MONSTER IN A CAN films - it's a solid entry - but I doubt you'll put it at the top of your list of them.
I love IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE, SATURN 3, ALIEN, PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES... you name it, I probably own it in this genre - and I look forward to adding LIFE to my collection. The ending is a fun shit and giggles sort of ending, but this film follows the formula pretty much full speed ahead. That said, I'd love to see the sequel - picking up exactly where things left off and continuing till Calvin goes to sleep. How about you?
All the performances are solid and fun. Ryan and Jake and Rebecca are lots of fun, my fave two characters are Ariyon Bakare's Hugh and Hiroyuke Sanada's Sho - as they've got the better drama and storylines to play with I feel.
So odd there wasn't a single boardgame reference or magazine reference in the film.
If you're looking for a bit of an intense Monster in a Can flick, this is a fun one.
Keep it cool,
Harry
