Aorta
MemberFacehuggerMarch 28, 2017While watching LIFE, I was reminded again and again of Journey to the Center of the Earth. There was a similar sense of wonder and peril, and the score was similarly diabolical and foreboding.
Jon Ekstrand's score for LIFE is practically a character in itself, a huge, pulsing vortex of cosmic doom, a caricature of science fiction scores from a bygone era, applied with startling effect. The very first sequence, simple as it is, portends the End of Times, in no small part thanks to the music that attends it. And the nauseating throb of the final scenes is pure horror gold.
This film very much feels like one of those big effects pictures from the late 50's / early 60's. Everything is hyper real, bigger than life, and utterly doomed. Our film makers understand that the harp of your soul need only be played on a few strings. There's even optimism, at the start, but it's quickly dispensed with and never seen again. LIFE made no attempt to soothe me, it took me exactly where I wanted to go, deep in the dark with a thing I can't comprehend, and kept me there, mercilessly, to the very last frame. That is fearless film making.
The antagonist in LIFE is life itself, the protection of it as much as protection from it. The second things go spectacularly south, our astronauts are thrust into a whole new reality, having to master their panic as things devolve into surreal menace, and the sense of being left to fate with no escape is strong and consistent from then on. Like life itself can be. The calamities that befall our crew are at once logical and incomprehensible, and humanity's lack of readiness is as much a villain as the creature itself.
The creature is unnerving even as a cell. At the size of a hand it's not just incredibly dangerous but primally sadistic and full of surprises, brimming with personality. It's method of digestion is alarming in that nightmare way you always wish someone would depict on screen, but can never quite describe. I am sick to death of bad monsters and this thing, even as a toddler, is what I've been waiting for, well, since Alien. In fact, it has one up on the dreaded MORB, this beast is brand new, with the potential of being almost impossible to anticipate and the next level sample of what cgi can provide.
The comparisons being made are both easy and inevitable. Gravity captured weightlessness and orbital disaster with unheard of clarity and style, but at the end of the day there are only so many ways to depict such a thing with realism. But Gravity was a serious film, not a monster movie looking suspiciously like Alien, except that save for the unsentimental setting and the stakes it's not really like Alien, either. It has a monster on a spaceship. Oh snap, I hoped to never see that again! Oh wait...
I do wish some things had been done differently, but I believe this is a matter of taste, and not worth arguing here. We can save that for after EVERYONE HAS SEEN IT. LOL. Joking aside (I am not joking. Buy a ticket. I'm watching you), I do believe if you want well made R rated material, and specifically imaginative space horror, you must vote with your dollars. I mean it when I say we're very lucky LIFE exists. Like Peter Weyland, I want more.
I think this movie suffers for being released in close proximity to a venerable chapter in the saga that gave this stuff a chance to breathe in the first place. I'm in hog heaven for that, but would hate to see the Giger Alien aesthetic dominate to the expense all other ideas. I like astronauts trapped with monsters. I hope something comes along to out-do LIFE. There's more that could be done, but I can't quite describe what it is.
