Life Review

An unbroken floating shot runs several minutes through the whole station before the plot arrives, handing off between six crew members in zero gravity, and it is the best thing here by a wide margin. The weightlessness is sold completely. Bodies drift with the right lag, hair behaves, and the camera moves like one more object with no floor to stand on.

Then Calvin starts killing people and Daniel Espinosa's film turns into a well upholstered copy of a picture released in 1979, complete with the crew that splits up, the hatch that does not seal, and the officer who insists on quarantine protocol until the story needs her not to. Rebecca Ferguson gives that woman more interior life than the writing has earned.

Gyllenhaal plays a medic hiding from Earth in orbit and mostly gets to look haunted through portholes. Ryan Reynolds is dispatched early and is missed for the rest. The creature is a genuinely good design, translucent and unpleasantly graceful, but it becomes so omnicompetent so quickly that the danger flattens into a queue. The last five minutes are cruel and land with more nerve than the hour before them.