Pointless and Cruel

Rating: 4/10 (11 March 2019)

We all have our own ideas about which might be the most disastrous trends in current Hollywood filmmaking. I vote for the trend that allows directors to essentially remake the science fiction action films that influenced them when they were young. This is the trend that in recent years has given us such dispensable works as Predators (NimrÃ³d Antal), The Thing (Matthijs van Heijningen), and Terminator Genisys (Alan Taylor). While directors such as Denis Villeneuve and Alex Garland have been laboring over sci-fi films such as Arrival and Annihilation - original works with layers of meaning that are revealed in subsequent viewings - these guys have been devoting precious time, hiring a huge range of impressive talents, and spending massive amounts of money, essentially to restage the cool scenes and remake the groovy films that so impressed them thirty or forty years ago.
Now we can add to this sad lot Life, director Daniel Espinosa's remake of Alien. Life deserves to be grouped with the films above - not Annihilation and Arrival, I mean the other, rotten ones - although to give credit where it's due, the film is the best of a bad lot. Its recreation of everyday life in the zero-G conditions of a space station is masterful and often beautiful, performed by an expert cast, and produced with obsession attention to realistic detail.
But what's the plot? An alien life form gets on board and is at first a source of wonder: as Jeff Goldblum says in The Lost World: Jurassic Park, "Oooh, ahhh, that's how it always starts. Then later there's running and screaming." In a Jurassic Park movie, at least there are dinosaurs to look at, and the chance of escape. In Life, once the monster grows big enough, it first crushes a disabled astronaut's hand - his agony played out for us lovingly in real time - and then eviscerates a rescuer, and then proceeds one by one to kill everyone on board horribly until at the end - SPOILER ALERT - it makes its way to earth, where its arrival will certainly end life as we know it.
What the hell is going on here? The film was written by the same guys who write the Deadpool films, which make horrific violence funny by cloaking it in a kind of live-action Roadrunner-vs-Coyote ambience. Life reveals the weakness behind their sensibility: without the jokes, the fast cuts, and Ryan Reynolds (who departs too soon from Life), the violence is just pointless and cruel - not only for the film's characters, but for its viewers.