LIFE: trying to replicate Aliens!

Hollywood has caught the sci-fi bug once again, folks. But can the forthcoming space thriller improve on Ridley Scott’s 1979 horror?

In the not so grand scale of Alien rip-offs, it’s likely there will be far worse movies than Daniel Espinosa’s Life. There’s Roger Corman’s 1982 effort Mutant, AKA Forbidden World, which features a monstrous alien with xenomorph-like teeth, while 1981’s Inseminoid ramped up the body horror of Ridley Scott’s iconic 1979 slasher-in-space and then we have the utterly, shockingly, Dark Universe (1983), featuring a very HR Giger-esque creature bent on destroying humanity.

All of the above were produced by film-makers with small pockets, at a time when Rotten Tomatoes did not exist and video store shelves were overloaded with low-rent, copycat sci-fi and fantasy trash.

But Life, which is out in March of this year, and the first full trailer for which aired during the Superbowl on 5 February, looks very much like an attempt to re-imagine Alien on a big budget, with an A-list cast and high-calibre special effects.

THE DANIEL ESPINOSA-DIRECTED ‘LIFE’ STARRING JAKE GYLLENHAAL, REBECCA FERGUSON AND RYAN REYNOLDS

Both Alien and Life feature a relentlessly destructive extra-terrestrial life form that seems to adapt to its surroundings and has the potential to wipe out life as we know it.

There are obvious parallels between the scene from the trailer in which Hugh Derry (Ariyon Bakare) is trapped in an airlock with the fast-growing creature and the bit in Alien in which Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is forced to lock her crewmates out of the Nostromo after John Hurt’s unfortunate Kane is attacked and impregnated by the facehugger.

Ryan Reynolds’ use of a flamethrower (think The Thing as well) to take on the monster in Life explicitly recalls the tactics used by Ripley against the xenomorph to stop it haemorrhaging acid blood.

The story, though, is set closer to home. Instead of being discovered by a motley assortment of poorly paid 22nd-century freight workers on an uncharted planetoid in deep space, the new alien threat is found on Mars by the present-day crew of the International Space Station.

The look and feel of Life are nearer to those of Gravity or Passengers, with crisp CGI and pristine interiors, than the grimy, gloomy veneer of Alien. .

Catch me if you can!

Where JJ Abrams’s Super 8 and the TV series Stranger Things act as spine-tingling homages to their 70s and 80s influences, Espinosa’s movie (lens flare apart) seems to lack such gorgeously rendered nods to the past. To put it another way, on the basis of the trailer, it appears to have stolen the plot from its predecessor without quite nailing the tone. Moreover, it’s arguable that by expanding the threat from the new organism to the whole of humanity, rather than just the astronauts, the story loses something of its power.

It’s also worth remembering that official Alien movies are still being made – Scott’s own Alien: Covenant (hope it’s better than the first outing a few years back) will open in cinemas just six weeks after Life, even though the saga has veered a long way from its original, claustrophobic, body-horror roots.

In the wake of the huge success of movies such as Gravity, Interstellar and The Martian, Hollywood has fallen in love with space all over again and so have the audience, and it’s easy to see why Life was green-lit. We just hope the film is rather good instead of utter space balls!