Alien’s infamous John Hurt chest-eruption scene is matched for gruesome relish if not shock value by a sequence in which the creature force-feeds itself to a key character. In the name of scientific research (or of narrative convenience) the head researcher (British actor Ariyon Bakare) decides to jump-start the organism out of its stasis, and is rewarded by a rapidly growing glob of gelatinous malice. The satellite contains Martian soil samples, within which is an inert single-celled organism: incontrovertible proof of life on Mars. With this stunning set piece, cinematographer Seamus McGarvey more than meets the challenge set by Emmanuel Lubezki’s Oscar-winning work on Gravity. But although this is undeniably an Alien rip-off, it’s an Alien rip-off that announces itself with a dizzyingly audacious zero-gravity single-shot sequence in which Ryan Reynolds wrests a wounded satellite out of orbit using a rob otic grabber claw. And if that premise sounds more than a little familiar, that’s because Daniel Espinosa’s enjoyable sci-fi horror movie shares narrative DNA with everything from Tarkovsky’s Solaris to Danny Boyle’s Sunshine to, most glaringly of all, Ridley Scott’s Alien. T he crew of a space station is picked off, one by one, by an extraterrestrial life form which seems to view the human contents of the craft as some kind of alien finger buffet.
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