I Watch Films: Life (2017)

Life is a sci-fi horror film* in which astronauts on the International space station discover living cells in a Mars return sample; obviously it gets loose and bad things happen. Alien meets Gravity is a good if unfair three word synopsis.

Anyway, a good if not exactly rigorous set of space operations**, lots of micro gravity that works very naturally. It’s quite muted in colour and tone. I enjoyed it, as it was suitably tense, but I don’t think it has a great deal to say.

The song that comes on over the credits is a good joke though.

Watch This: For competent space horror
Don’t Watch This: If gruesome death and injury and inevitable creeping doom aren’t your thing.

* Sadly not a big screen version of the cop show of the same name with zen-obsessed Damien Lewis and recovering addict Sarah Shahi, which I found the funniest program on TV when it was on. Precisely because it wasn’t a comedy the sparse jokes sparkled more brightly.

** Overriding a Soyuz capsule to send it into deep space won’t work because it can’t reach escape velocity, so unless he is able to burn and circularise the orbit at apoapsis (a dubious assumption at that point in the film) it’s going to be an elliptical orbit whose lowest point is approximately at the original orbit, but never mind that.