LIFE - An Old Trope in Sci-Fi Set Aboard The ISS - Not Great But Worth Seeing Once

Life

I never saw an ad or preview for this film. I also know that it did not play in either of the two local theaters in the town where I live, so this film was completely off my radar. I actually didn’t learn anything about it until my wife found it advertised on sale in an ad for a local department store so I had her pick up the BluRay.

Life is a rehashing of an age-old trope in science fiction of a crew being trapped in a confined place with a malevolent alien stalking them. They more or less get picked off one at a time until there is only one survivor. While there is not a lot new in the story, which for the most part is extremely predictable, there are some aspects that, in my opinion, make this film worth a look if you can find it in a Red Box, on a streaming service, or by waiting until it is in the $5 bin at a local department store. Judging from the ratings I have seen, it shouldn’t be a long wait.

The story is set mostly aboard the International Space Station with a crew of six.  There are two crewmembers from the US, two from the UK, one from Japan, and one from Russia. In the opening scene, an unmanned vehicle returning from Mars could possibly be delivering evidence of extraterrestrial life on board. The probe is damaged when it passes through an asteroid field and is unable to be guided back to its appointed landing place, wherever that might have been. As it works out, the crew of the ISS are able to capture the probe before it either burns up in the atmosphere or goes skipping off into interplanetary space.

A scientist aboard the ISS then finds and revives a single-celled organism which begins to multiply into a multi-celled life form. The crew of the space station goes on television with a classroom full of kids who give the name “Calvin” to the creature which is how it is referred for the rest of the film. Calvin goes dormant again when there is an atmospheric accident aboard the station and the scientist decides that he will try to revive the creature with a mild electric shock. While this does indeed revive Calvin, it also apparently angers it and it attacks the scientist and kills another crewmember that tries to rescue the scientist.

For most of the rest of the film, Calvin continues to kill crewmembers, and there is no way to inform ground crews because communications are cut off by a malfunction of station systems. At the same time, Calvin grows rapidly as it kills and consumes crewmembers. The remaining crew try to push the creature into deep space by using the station's thrusters when Calvin tries to re-enter the station through the thruster ports, but all this does is cause the station to fall into a decaying orbit.

The crew had managed to get a distress call off before the comms system went off line and the response from ground crews is to send an unmanned Soyuz craft to push the station out into deep space and prevent Calvin from landing on Earth. The two remaining crew members of the station decide they cannot allow the virtually indestructible Calvin to reach the planet and they use two escape pods (that do not actually exist on the real ISS) to escape, but one crew member decides to sacrifice himself by luring Calvin into his pod and launching it into deep space while the other is to return to Earth to explain what has transpired aboard the doomed station.

Both pods are launched at the same time. One is thrown off course when it hits some debris and careens off into deep space while the other performs a controlled re-entry from the station, splashing down near two Vietnamese fishermen in a boat.  As it turns out, it is the pod with Calvin aboard that splashes down and is opened by the unaware fishermen, thus releasing the organism on the planet.

As I mentioned earlier, it is quite predictable. As a matter of fact, my thirteen year-old daughter knew that the pod that landed in the ocean would contain Calvin.  But beyond the story, there is much in this film to be admired and appreciated.

First of all, the performances of the cast as astronauts aboard the ISS are quite convincing. Now, I don’t claim to know everything about astronaut training, but I do know that they are trained to deal with problems that arise without panicking, rather they are trained to analyze the problem, find a solution and execute. That is exactly what the crew on the ISS in Life try to do, but as it is a film, the odds are against them from the beginning and with the nature of the creature that they are facing, there is no amount of training that will help them deal with the danger.

When on board the ISS, astronauts move from one place to another by pulling themselves along rails and other handholds that give them a good start then they basically fly from one place to another. Those aboard the ISS call this “translating.” As I watched the film, I was impressed with how smoothly astronauts moved from one place to another and wondered how it was done. Well, they used wires to fly the actors from one place to another on a station that was made up largely a green screen background and a few items that the crew had to interact with, and the film had a nearly authentic look to it. I have watch a lot of NASA TV and the behaviors of the Life actors was very much like what I have seen on NASA’s service. When the astronauts on the station are still in the movie, they are still moving in the micro-gravity environment of low Earth orbit and they are never really still, rather they kind of bob up and down a bit. I would have to say that there was a lot of time and effort that went into making this film as authentic as possible.

One of the things that I thought was unfortunate about the film is that I didn’t really care about any of the characters. There was really nothing that endeared them to me and I didn’t really care whether Calvin killed them or not; they were quite one-dimensional. So, as one can note from my synopsis, I cannot really recall any of the character’s names and no one special comes to mind. Not even the character who decided to sacrifice himself at the end to save his fellow crewmate, and also to save the planet from a relentless entity.

So, all in all, I enjoyed the film in spite of the shallow handling of the trope (people versus a malicious alien in a confined space) and the lack of depth of the characters. The sets and the performances of the actors themselves made it a fun film to watch with the positives slightly outweighing the negatives.

Well, there it is…

Qapla'!

Edited By Benjamin Arrowood

Alien: Covenant - Nothing New In This Film But Worth Seeing Anyway

Alien: Covenant

***Spoiler Alert***

Following on the heels of Prometheus, Ridley Scott brings us this second film in what is to be a trilogy of films that are slated to serve as prequels to the original Alien movie of 1979.

Following a prologue in which Peter Weyland speaks with the synthetic crewmember of the Prometheus, who promises that one day they will search for mankind’s creator together. The film moves on to a colonization ship called Covenant with over two thousand colonists and a thousand embryos aboard, all in stasis. They are bound for a remote planet known as Origae-6. All is proceeding as planned when Walter, the synthetic assigned to Covenant detects that she ship has been hit by a neutrino burst damaging the ship and killing some of the colonists. Walter orders the ship’s computer to wake the crew from stasis. During the awakening process, the captain’s stasis pod malfunctions killing him and leaving the first officer, Oram in charge.

While the crew makes repairs to the ship, a radio communication is picked up from a nearby planet. Against the protests of Daniels, the original captain’s widow, Captain Oram decides to investigate.

Leaving the Covenant, a team takes a lander down to the surface where they trace the radio transmission to an Engineer ship. While on the surface, two members of the team are infected with alien spores and become sick. Those two are then quarantined in the lander’s medical bay. It isn’t long before a creature, a Neomorph, bursts from one of the infected crew’s back and kills another member of the crew. Another crewmember attempts to shoot the Neomorph but misses and hits a tank of volatile gas causing an explosion that destroys the lander. The Neomorph survives the explosion and escapes to the planet’s surface while the other infected crewman has another such creature burst from his body.

Together, the Neomorphs attack the remaining crew of the lander and kill yet another member of the crew. The rest continue to fight until David, who has survived the failed Prometheus mission, arrives on the scene and rescues what is left of the lander’s crew. He leads them to a city full of Engineer corpses. David then explains that when he and Dr. Shaw from the Prometheus arrived in the Engineer ship they had commandeered, the black liquid bio weapon was accidentally released killing the native population, David further claimed that Shaw died when the ship crashed.

As the remaining crew tries to contact the Covenant, the remaining Neomorph attacks, killing another member of the crew. David tries to communicate with the creature and is appalled when Oram kills it. Oram then turns his weapon on David and forces him to explain that the aliens are actually the result of experiments he has been performing with the black liquid bio weapon to create a new species. David then takes Oram into an incubation chamber and tricks him into being grabbed by a facehugger and implanting an embryo in Oram. It isn’t long before a Xenomorph erupts from Oram’s chest.

While the remaining members of the lander’s crew go in search of Oram, Walter confronts David after learning that David had deliberately released the bio weapon on the Engineers. David tries to justify his actions by explaining that humans are an inferior race that should not be allowed to colonize the galaxy. Walter disagrees so David disables him and then captures crewmember Daniels and reveals that Shaw didn’t actually die from a crash, but was used by David as a test subject for his experiments. Walter manages to reactivate himself and engages David in combat while Daniels escapes and another member of the crew is attacked by a facehugger. Daniels, Walter, and the infected crewmember are rescued by another lander, but not before yet another crewmember is killed by the Xenomorph.

The crew of the second lander manages to kill the Xenomorph before they dock with the Covenant, but yet another Xenomorph bursts out of the chest of the infected crew member and kills two more crew. With Walter’s help, the ship’s pilot and Daniels corner the Xenomorph in the ship’s airlock and flush it into space.

The Covenant resumes its original course to Origae-6 and the remaining crew go back into stasis. As Walter is putting Daniels back under, she realizes that Walter is actually David, but falls asleep before she can do anything about it. David then regurgitates two alien embryos and places them in stasis with the human embryos.  Then, in Walter’s name, he records a log entry stating that all members of the crew, save Daniels and the ship’s pilot, were killed by the neutrino blast.

On the downside, I found the film wholly predictable. There was really nothing new to this film and it might fit into a “this has all been done before;” same song, different verse.  I knew as soon as the members of the crew headed for the planet that most of them would die, save one or two survivors, and one of those survivors would be infected with a Xenomorph embryo that would threaten the remaining crew of the Covenant itself. Later in the film, when the two artificial lifeforms came face to face, I also knew that Walter would be replaced by David which would be revealed at the very end of the film. It is pretty much the same trope that has taken place in all of the films in the franchise.

However, that is not to say that the film is not entertaining and worth a watch, if not in the theater, at least when it comes out on BluRay. I enjoyed the film because of the performances turned in by the main characters, especially those of Michael Fassbender as David/Walter and Katherine Waterston in her Ripley-like role as Daniels “Dany” Branson.

It is no secret that the synthetic people on missions in the Alien franchise have been somewhat problematic, mostly because they had some agenda that the humans were not aware of. In the original Alien films, it was known that the corporation wanted the Xenomorphs for their value as weapons. The ship’s computer (known usually as Mother) and the synthetic worked hard to try to make sure that a creature was captured to be returned to Earth for exploitation. Failing that, the corporation sent a human in Aliens. In the case of David, I am not positive on what his motivation is. Was he programmed by the corporation to look for dangerous life, or is it a project he took on because he could?  David was quite advanced and it is mentioned in the film that Walter has been dumbed down a bit. So we have two identical appearing characters with different behaviors. This would be a challenge for any actor; be the same, but different. Fassbender pulls it off quite well. Along with that, he becomes increasingly more sinister as the film unspools.

In this franchise, any strong female character is going to be compared to Ellen Ripley. So far, we have Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, the extremely tough character from Prometheus, and now Daniels Branson, the terraforming expert aboard the Covenant. Dany Daniels is another intelligent, tough, and driven character that deserves as much respect as Ripley, but they are not the same, they are indeed their own characters.

So, while there is really not a lot new in this film, I would recommend seeing it anyway, it does answer a few questions raised in Prometheus, and raises a few more questions that I hope will be answered in the next film in this long-lived franchise. Despite the predictability of the story, it is a very good Sci-Fi Thriller and will give you a scare every now and then.

Well, there it is…

Qapla’!

Edited By Benjamin Arrowood