Life: There’s life after half hour

Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, Ryan Reynolds, Hiroyuki Sanada, Ariyon Bakare, Olga Dihovichnaya

Rated: 7/10

This slow starter seems to have lost the race in the beginning but moves can be deceptive and this one is extremely so. After the first half-hour, the film — an extra terrestrial horror show with an unexpected end — picks up like rocket fuel on the burn and keeps you on the edge through the rest of the one-and-a-half-hour movie.

After the biologist on board a space ship on a mission in Mars, taps a hibernated life cell on the Red planet and shocks it into life in a lab experiment, the deadly turn of events start never to look back. Though the confines of the space ship can be claustrophobic for a two-hour drama mainly focussing on sealing the escape pipes and tunnels of the ship apparently to save the earth from the catastrophic lab alien, the drama around this octopus-like shape is enough to catch you unawares and make you wonder if at all space missions should looking for life outside Earth.

As the alien, named Calvin, gets more and more aggressive and unrelenting, not to mention fatal, and is kind of protected by the scientist who made it as “someone who does not hate you but has to kill you for survival” the audience gets into the room with the hapless crew which goes into the calorie count of the alien till a plan seems to work.

As claimed, the film is a thriller indeed, a differently-enabled one at that. A taut, pacey and engrossing saga after it tides over its teething problem.

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 26 March, 2017