Life

**Life** is a 2017 film starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, Ryan Reynolds, Hiroyuki Sanada, Ariyon Bakare and Olga Dykhovichnaya, directed by Daniel Espinosa, written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick and produced by Bonnie Curtis, David Ellison, Dana Goldberg and Julie Lynn.

The film was a financial failure as it generated a loss of $65 million.

## Plot

In the near future, the unmanned Pilgrim 7 space probe returns from Mars to Earth orbit with soil samples potentially containing evidence of extraterrestrial life. The probe is captured and its samples retrieved by the International Space Station and its six-member crew. Exobiologist Hugh Derry, who is paralyzed from the waist down, revives a dormant cell from the sample, which quickly grows into a multi-celled organism that American school children name "Calvin." Hugh realizes that Calvin's cells can change their specialization, acting as muscle, neuron, and photosensory cells all at once.

An accident in the lab causes Calvin to become dormant; Hugh attempts to revive Calvin with electric shocks, but Calvin immediately becomes hostile and attacks Hugh, crushing his right hand. While Hugh lies unconscious from Calvin's attack, Calvin uses Hugh's electric shock tool to escape its enclosure; now free in the laboratory, Calvin devours a lab rat by absorbing it, growing in size. Engineer Rory Adams enters the lab to rescue Hugh; however, he is locked in by fellow crew member and physician David Jordan to keep Calvin contained, after it latches onto Rory's leg. He fights Calvin off by burning it with an exposed element from a handheld light. Rory then, unsuccessfully, attacks Calvin with an incinerator component removed from a lab station; Calvin enters his mouth, devouring his organs from the inside and killing him. Emerging from Rory's mouth even larger, Calvin escapes through a fire-control vent that has been set off.

Finding their communication with Earth cut off due to overheating of the communication systems, ISS commander Ekaterina Golovkina performs a space walk to find and fix the problem. She discovers that Calvin has breached the ISS's cooling system; soon after, Calvin attacks her, rupturing her spacesuit's coolant system in the process and causing the coolant in the system to fill her suit. She blindly makes her way back to the airlock; however, she and the crew realize that if she re-enters, Calvin will also be able to re-enter the ISS. Hence, she refuses to open the hatch and stops David from helping her do so; this keeps Calvin out of the station for the time being but also causes her to drown and die in her spacesuit.

Calvin then attempts to re-enter the station through its maneuvering thrusters. The crew try to fire the thrusters to blast Calvin away from the spacecraft, but their attempts fail, using up too much fuel and causing the ISS to enter a decaying orbit where it will burn up in Earth's atmosphere. Pilot Sho Murakami informs the crew that they need to use the station's remaining fuel to get back into a safe orbit, although this allows Calvin to re-enter the station. The crew plan to make Calvin dormant by sealing themselves into one module and venting the atmosphere from the rest of the station.

After the crew finalize preparations to do so, Hugh enters cardiac arrest. The crew then discover that Calvin has been feeding off Hugh's paralyzed leg. Calvin attacks the rest of the crew; Sho seals himself in a sleeping pod. As Calvin tries to break its glass, David and quarantine officer Miranda North use Hugh's corpse as bait to lure Calvin away from Sho and trap it in another module, in order to deprive it of oxygen. Having received a distress call prior to the damage to the ISS's communication system, Earth sends a Soyuz spacecraft to the station as a fail-safe plan to push the station into deep space. Believing the Soyuz to be on a rescue mission for the ISS crew, Sho leaves his pod and moves to board it, forcing open its hatch; Calvin then attacks the Soyuz astronauts and Sho, wrecking the craft's docking mechanisms, resulting in the capsule crashing into the ISS, killing Sho and the Soyuz cosmonauts, and causing the ISS's orbit to decay again.

The only two survivors, David and Miranda, aware that Calvin could survive re-entry into Earth's atmosphere, plan for David to lure Calvin into one of the two escape pods attached to the ISS and for David to manually pilot the pod into deep space, isolating Calvin, and allowing Miranda to return to Earth in the other pod. David manages to lure Calvin into his pod, while Miranda enters her pod; as they simultaneously undock their pods from the ISS, one of the pods hits debris and is damaged, veering off course. In David's pod, Calvin attacks him as he struggles to manually pilot the pod; in Miranda's pod, she records a black box message in case of her death during re-entry informing the world of her colleagues' deaths and not to trust Calvin nor any extraterrestrial life from Mars as well as to destroy Calvin at any cost should it make its way to Earth.

The two pods separate, one earthbound, the other spiraling away from Earth. The earthbound pod lands in the ocean; two nearby Vietnamese fishermen approach it. As they look into the pod, it is revealed to be David's, with the astronaut now restrained by Calvin, after it has grown to fill the pod compartment. Meanwhile, Miranda's pod's navigation system fails due to damage sustained from the debris, sending her flying away from Earth out of control, much to her horror. On Earth, despite David's attempts to warn them, the fishermen open the pod's hatch, as more boats arrive on the scene.