Life

Daniel Espinosa inverts the usual order of the genre. The first stretch of the hundred and four minutes belongs to crew routine and laboratory work on a specimen, and the horror starts late. Anyone waiting for the creature may find that delay long, though the tension afterwards feeds entirely on that routine breaking. The opening was designed as one unbroken shot, assembled using a station model built by Industrial Light and Magic with Double Negative. Weightlessness was not solved digitally: the actors were suspended on old fashioned wires that were painted out afterwards. The suits weighed over twenty kilos, so the heaviness on screen is the load itself, not acting. Production design went to Nigel Phelps, who had worked on the fourth Alien film, which stops this picture’s debt to that tradition from looking accidental. Espinosa stated his aim plainly: Gravity looked at the vastness of space and he wanted to look at being shut in. A shot recycled from the Spider-Man films into the trailer fed a rumour of a secret Venom prequel, later denied. Worth it if watching a crew follow and then botch its own procedures is the suspense you want. Skip it if a cast pairing Jake Gyllenhaal with Ryan Reynolds makes you expect a familiar survival balance, which the film breaks early.