Tonight, for Friday Horror, we watched Life. Not the David Attenborough documentary series; rather, the Alien inspired sci-fi horror movie that came out earlier this year. It was a film I went to see at the cinema mere days after the collapse of my marriage, so I was interested to revisit it with a clear mind, as it were.
The story is fairly standard for the genre, and concerns a group of people who get completely fucked over by a parasite they allow into their midst.
Given my state of mind at the time, I was surprised how much of it I remembered. Then again, it’s got some pretty memorable scenes–a certain character’s death scene among them. It’s a film that doesn’t set out to do anything more than it says on the box, and I generally appreciate that in a film. Life knows that it’s basically doing a slightly fresh spin on Alien and doesn’t have any pretensions beyond that. It’s got a group of characters who need to die in creative ways; it’s got a sci-fi creature that needs to be at least be something a little bit different; and it needs to do something fun with the ending. It ticks all of those boxes with flying colours.
Yeah, that’s a mixed metaphor. What are you gonna do about it?