He’s the British scientist in charge of analyzing the alien creature in movie “Life.”
An atmospheric horror film about an ominous Martian who stalks the crew within the claustrophobic confines of a spacecraft, it’s a well-paced thriller. The space drama follows a team of scientists on a mission who include; a space connoisseur (Jake Gyllenhaal), a microbiologist (Rebecca Ferguson), a flight engineer (Sho Murakami), a Russian cosmonaut (Olga Dihovichnaya), flight mechanic (Ryan Reynolds) an Ariyon Bakare’s character, who plays a biologist called Hugh Derry.
“He is a paraplegic and lost the use of his legs when he was ten years old,” says Bakare, who admits that the script scared his pants off before he even joined the project. “I was reading the script, got to one page and I literally screamed,” he says. “I was just shocked by how it guides the characters into this false sense of security. You think that everything’s going to be all right, and then it twists into something else.”
To play a paraplegic in zero gravity required a bit more harness work from Bakare, whose past film credits include the role of Greeghan in the Wachowskis’ “Jupiter Ascending,” Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” and “Dancing on the Edge” opposite Chiwetel Ejiofor. “All of the other characters have one harness, but I had three: a body harness, a swivel, and a jerk vest, which was like a straightjacket,” he says. “Hugh can’t move his legs, so in one particular scene – when his hand gets crushed – his legs have got to be wild and ferocious,” shares the British actor, writer and director who has been working across film, television and theater.
The scientists are on an eight-month mission to Mars to find other life forms when they discover a rapidly evolving life form that could have caused extinction on the planet. Calvin, as he’s christened, is a single cell organism made up of muscle and tissue and grows in new and more repellant forms with each stage. A metamorphic creature that adapts to his environment, Hugh grows rather fond of it, much to everyone’s disdain. Over the course of the rest of the film, Calvin gets bigger, gets pissed off and eventually starts plucking off each crew-member and the mission becomes to stop the menace from reaching planet Earth.
Directed by Daniel Espinosa (“Safe House”), it’s slow to start, but once Calvin is ticked off, the thrills and chills are truly accomplished in this atmospheric space flick. There is a skill in the direction that evokes brilliant tension. A carefully crafted space-horror film with decent jolts, there’s no better location to unleash this exploration of the unknown than the cramped, zero-gravity, inhospitable climate of the International Space Station. Scene to scene, encounter to encounter, its tension builds unrelentingly and by the end of this Space fest, you will be wondering how soon a sequel will hit theaters. The score, which heightens the tension, is melodic, then becomes atonal in a way that fits a terrifying thriller and in the third act befittingly becomes more ominous and dissonant.
We’ve seen this type of flick before with Ridley Scott’s 1979 classic film “Alien,” which “Life” borrows from, but with the recent onslaught of space dramas; “Interstellar,” “The Martian,” “Passengers” and “Arrival,” it’s definitely fun to revisit another film with an ominous Martian encounter.
