![]() The crew itself is international and diverse: their mission’s sponsors are described as “American, Russian and Chinese” although that might just be a description of the film’s target market territories. Then it grabs the little spatula with which one of the scientists is prodding it, with surprising strength and hostility. It’s growing at an alarming rate in its petri dish, like a little two-armed jellyfish the size of a nickel. Photograph: Moviestore/REX/ShutterstockĪ schoolkid back on the home planet wins a competition to name this entity and her choice of Calvin might annoy the Catholic church until it becomes clear what kind of a creature Calvin is. They have given a big fat yes to David Bowie’s immortal question. But to their astonishment and excitement, the crew find that within the dust is what looks like a tiny, living monocellular organism. The crew must effectively “catch” this craft, like a mailbag chucked from a speeding train, decant its contents and analyse them in secure conditions which mean that any possible bacteria contained in this material don’t infect anyone down on earth. An automated craft is about to arrive from Mars after a long flight, freighted with red rock and dust. Life is about a liaison spacecraft which at some time in the future is hovering outside Earth’s atmosphere, acting as both floating science lab and halfway house. It has the audience leaving the cinema with ironic grins on their faces. At the last moment, Reese and Wernick and director Daniel Espinosa hit their retro-rockets for a neat little 180-degree twist, thankfully reversing the prevailing mood of sucrose fatalism. Actually, Life’s screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (known for box-office smash Deadpool) seem also to have been as impressed as everyone else by Alfonso Cuarón’s sci-fi drama Gravity, with their scenes of lone astronauts wobbling about outside the spaceship which is always liable to get smashed to low-tech smithereens.
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