Life Dvd

Life is a 2017 American sci-fi horror film directed by Daniel Espinosa, written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick and starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, and Ryan Reynolds. The film follows a six-member crew of the International Space Station that uncovers the first evidence of life on Mars.

The first co-production between Skydance Media and Sony Pictures, the film had its world premiere at South by Southwest on March 18, 2017, and was theatrically released in the United States by Columbia Pictures on March 24, 2017. It received mixed reviews, with praise for its acting, visuals and screenplay, but some criticised for its lack of originality. The film grossed $100 million worldwide.

Plot

In the near future, the unmanned Pilgrim 7 space probe returns from Mars to Earth orbit with soil samples potentially containing evidence of extraterrestrial life. The probe is intercepted by the International Space Station, whose six-member crew retrieves its samples. Exobiologist Hugh Derry revives a dormant cell from the sample, which quickly grows into a multi-celled organism that American school children name “Calvin.” Derry realizes that Calvin’s cells can change their specialization, acting as muscle, neuron, and photosensory cells all at once.

Derry is extremely reckless with the experimentation and research on Calvin and does not follow safe quarantine protocols and is drunk on his success. Due to his foolish mistake a lab accident causes Calvin to become dormant. Derry attempts to revive it with electric shocks, but Calvin brutally crushes his hand and knocks him unconscious. Calvin escapes its enclosure and it devours a lab rat, growing in size. Engineer Rory Adams tries to rescue Derry, but is quarantined in the lab when Calvin attacks him. Adams tries to fight off Calvin, but is devoured; Calvin escapes through a fire-control vent. Soon after, the station’s communication system overheats, cutting off all contact with Earth. ISS commander Ekaterina Golovkina performs a space walk to find and fix the problem, which turns out to be Calvin. Calvin attacks her and ruptures her spacesuit’s coolant system. As her suit fills with coolant, Golovkina blindly makes her way to the airlock. She and the crew realize that Calvin will re-enter the station if they let her in, so she chooses to stay outside and drowns in her spacesuit.

Calvin attempts to re-enter the station through its maneuvering thrusters. The crew fire the thrusters to blast it away, but they drain so much fuel that it causes the ISS to enter a decaying orbit, where it will burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. Pilot Sho Murakami suggests using the ISS’s remaining fuel to get back into a safe orbit even though it will allow Calvin to re-enter. The crew seal themselves in one side of the station and prepare to vent the atmosphere from the other side to render Calvin dormant. Derry suddenly dies and the crew finds Calvin feeding on his leg and are attacked. Murakami seals himself inside a sleeping pod, while Calvin tries to break inside. Physician David Jordan and Quarantine Officer Miranda North use Derry’s corpse as bait to lure Calvin away and trap it in the other side. They discover a Soyuz spacecraft is on its way to intercept an earlier distress call from the ISS. As the Soyuz pushes the ISS out of Earth’s orbit, Murakami tries to board the craft, which results in the Soyuz crashing into the ISS, killing him and the Soyuz crew and causing the ISS’s orbit to decay again.

The remaining survivors, Jordan and North, speculate that Calvin could survive re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere, so they plan to lure Calvin into one of the ISS’ two escape pods. Once inside, Jordan will manually pilot Calvin’s pod into deep space, isolating it and allowing North to return to Earth in the other pod. Their plan works apparently. However, North’s pod is eventually hit by debris, while Jordan is attacked by Calvin. As North’s pod flies in one direction, she records a black box message to warn Earth of Calvin’s threat. Eventually, one of these two pods lands on the sea and is found by Vietnamese fishermen, while the other pod was knocked away from Earth. What the Vietnamese fishermen finds turns out to be Jordan’s pod, not North’s. The Vietnamese fishermen then open Jordan’s pod despite his warnings, as other boats are shown arriving at the scene.

Cast

Jake Gyllenhaal as Dr. David Jordan, USA, ISS medical officer.
Rebecca Ferguson as Dr. Miranda North, UK, CDC quarantine officer.
Ryan Reynolds as Rory Adams, USA, ISS engineer.
Hiroyuki Sanada as Sho Murakami, Japan, ISS systems engineer.
Ariyon Bakare as Dr. Hugh Derry, UK, ISS exobiologist.
Olga Dihovichnaya as Ekaterina Golovkina, Russia, ISS Mission Commander.