Daniel Espinosa – LIFE
– Yet another faded copy of Alien.
- The way the emotion of discovering “alien” life is staged.
- Not at all original.
- Confusing and foul editing.
JUST A FEW WORDS (RIGHT AFTER THE VIEWING):
Life, a 2017 film by Daniel Espinosa, begins by trying to imitate Gravity (the floating camera movements that bring with it the doubt of the digital internal editing rather than the long-takes feeling) and obviously, like any film of the genre, it ends up sinking in comparison with the film that gave rise to this trend: that Alien by Ridley Scott that the film would like to quote in a certain way but that ends up fadingly copying, succeeding in the real hard task of trivializing even Alien‘s concepts and philosophy.
Fundamentally, the film is not terrible, but, in addition to being derivative, it is organized in an editing structure that, especially towards the end, becomes unfair and confusing.
We generally admire editing forms that tickle the viewer, hiding scraps of information, playing with the interpretative process, but that refrain from using cloying tricks that have the only (often unsuccessful) purpose of trying to transform something absolutely banal into something that contains that element of surprise that unfortunately a bad writing has failed to impress on the narrative.
When this happens, particularly in the final scenes of a film, one can only underline how this use of a foul editing trick should be defined: a capital fault of a film that basically has little, if nothing at all, to say.
The fact that the editing is clumsy and confusing – and it tries to give you the feeling that things have gone in a certain way, and then “reverse” the course with a twist so clearly aimed at trying to overturn the expectations that it loses every possible conceptual function of the ending – does not make the film more interesting, but it certainly succeed in making us wonder why we wasted almost two hours to watch something that cannot even focus on what it wanted to express and sacrifices everything on the altar of a spectacular show frankly empty and unnerving.
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GENERAL INFO:
6.6
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