News culture This excellent science fiction film could be the perfect prequel to Alien, but it isn’t!
A few weeks before the release of Alien: Romulus, we return to a completely different feature film that could have perfectly served as a prequel to the saga. Today we talk about Life: Origin Unknown.
An alien film that isn’t one
Since the release of the very first Alien film by Ridley Scott in 1979, there have been numerous horror science fiction feature films that build on the solid foundations laid by this first installment. However, few have ultimately managed to capture the essence of this unparalleled film saga. However, we do retain some projects that have managed to appropriate the genre with a certain degree of success without reinventing it. This is the case, for example, with Life: Origin Unknown, a 2017 feature film starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Ryan Reynolds and Rebecca Ferguson.
This group of stars is brought together to serve a classic but effective plot: astronauts, who are to be deployed aboard the ISS, recover a space probe from Mars that may contain some form of life. Once on board the station, they then investigate this organism, which, after an accident, proves to be hostile, begins to grow and destroys the astronauts one by one. In short, it is almost exactly the scenario of the very first Alien. But unlike the Xenomorph, here the creature is much more abstract and the story more anchored in reality, as it is set in our time and near our planet.
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A mastered film
If we compare “Life” with “Alien” given the obvious connection, you should know that the film was the subject of a strange theory when it was released. At the time, fans believed that “Life” was actually a prequel to “Venom”. The two films were produced by Sony and, given the similarity between the creature from “Life” and the symbiote, the community therefore thought about a joint project led by the giant. A vague theory that caused so much excitement that Sony had to quickly deny it.
Once again, Life: Unknown Origin doesn’t reinvent the wheel, quite the opposite. But the film is sufficiently mastered to provide good entertainment for viewers who are fans of horror and science fiction. And that’s what the press and audience remembered when it was released in 2017. On AlloCiné, Life: Unknown Origin is rated 3.3/5 by the press and 3.5/5 by the audience. A very honorable score for this feature film that you can find in particular on Netflix and that will make you wait until the release of Alien: Romulus, scheduled for August 14.
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