The New Life Trailers Are Eerie, Claustrophobic, and…Crunchy?

Update: Sony Pictures also released a third trailer for Life which reveals what the movie’s aliens look like. (via io9)

Two new trailers for the upcoming science fiction film, Life, have dropped, and they feel familiar in some of the best ways. With the tagline, “We were better off alone,” the trailers showcase the claustrophobia of a space station and the surprisingly crunchy horror of the film’s parasitic aliens. (We still don’t get a good look at the aliens outside of their petri dish, though.)

First off, there’s the short Super Bowl spot. This is where I first noticed the horribly crunchy noise that Life‘s aliens make when they attack a human host/victim. Rather than sounding slimey or bloody, it sounds like bones being crushed and split. It’s an intriguing, effective sound for body horror.

Then there’s the full-length trailer. This one is eerily set to John F. Kennedy’s optimistic 1962 speech on the space effort, originally delivered at Rice University. Under Kennedy’s signature accent and forward-looking message, things start to go perilously wrong on Life‘s space station.

With all the quarantining and claustrophobia, the film is clearly cribbing from the Alien playbook–and I’m not mad about that. A lot of the cinematography also feels very 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the angle of scientific exploration, the turn from triumph to terror,  looks promising.

Fittingly for both Kennedy’s message and the realities of international space exploration, Life seems to feature a multicultural crew–but the only black cast member looks like he gets killed off, and the trailer heavily emphasizes the three white characters. Here’s hoping that that’s a question of marketing–Ryan Reynolds and Jake Gyllenhaal are two of the film’s biggest names–and not a warning sign of tokenism.

Directed by Daniel Espinosa and written by the Deadpool team of Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, Life stars Ariyon Bakare, Rebecca Ferguson, Jake Gyllenhaal, Ryan Reynolds, and Hiroyuki Sanada. It lands in theaters on March 24, 2017.

(Via Nerdist; image via screengrab)

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