Calvin the Martian, and the True Meaning of LIFE

Calvin the alien: young, curious, and full of life. What could possibly go wrong? (Credit: Skydance/Columbia Pictures) LIFE the movie is both predictable and full of surprises, much like...er...life itself. In the broad sense, it is a monster-run-amok genre film. No spoilers there; you already know that if you've seen the trailers or even just the promotional posters. The interesting parts lie in the movie's details, which deviate from expectations in provocative ways. The setting of LIFE is not far away in a far-off future, as in Alien (an obvious source of inspiration), but aboard the International Space Station sometime within the next few years. The monster is not some arbitrarily conceived extraterrestrial, but (mild spoiler) a revived organism retrieved from Mars by a NASA spacecraft. And the monster's targets are not some hapless set of spaceship employees but a highly trained crew who nevertheless (hardly any spoiler at all) make a series of terribly bad decisions. Those signs of deeper thinking provide the best moments in LIFE. The space station setting looks and feels like a real space station. The idea of quarantining a Mars sample in orbit makes logical sense (although the way the sample arrives is more about cinema than celestial mechanics). Even the medical events in the movie are grounded in reality--due, in no small part, to the input of Kevin Fong, an expert in space medicine at University College London, who advised the movie. I spoke with Fong and director Daniel Espinosa, who previously directed the thriller Safe House, to explore their vision of the world of LIFE. I was especially curious to hear how they set the movie's balance between scientific verisimilitude and genre storytelling. An edited version of my conversation follows.