The unmanned Pilgrim 7 space probe is returning

from Mars to the International Space Station (ISS) with a

soil sample that might contain evidence of extraterrestrial
life, when it enters an asteroid field and is severely
damaged.
The six-member ISS crew captures the spacecraft
and exobiologist Hugh Derry revives a dormant cell from the
sample; it quickly grows into a multi-celled organism that
American school children name "Calvin". After an
atmospheric accident in the lab, Calvin becomes dormant.
Hugh revives Calvin with mild electric shocks, but Calvin
immediately becomes hostile and attacks Hugh, crushing
his hand. While Hugh lies unconscious from Calvin's attack,
Calvin uses the electric shock tool Hugh wielded to escape
his immediate enclosure. Now free in the lab room, Calvin
devours a lab rat by absorbing it and grows in size.
Engineer Rory Adams uses the opportunity to enter the
room and rescue Hugh. However, Calvin latches onto
Rory's leg and physician David Jordan locks Rory in the
room to keep Calvin contained. After Rory unsuccessfully
attacks Calvin with a flame thrower, Calvin enters his mouth,
killing him by devouring his organs from the inside.
Emerging from Rory's mouth even larger, Calvin escapes
through a fire-control vent. Hugh theorizes that lack of
breathable air on Mars is what kept the organism dormant.
Finding their communication with Earth cut off, due to
overheating of the communication systems, mission
commander Ekaterina Golovkina performs a space walk to
fix the overheating. Calvin, having breached the cooling
systems, attacks her outside the ISS and ruptures her
spacesuit's coolant system in the process, causing toxic
liquid to fill her helmet. She struggles to get back into ISS,
but eventually realizes that Calvin will also be able to re-
enter the space station. She refuses to open the airlock to
seek help, and stops David from doing so as well. This
keeps Calvin out of the station, but also causes Ekaterina to
drown in her spacesuit and her body to drift away into space.
Calvin attempts to enter the station through the thrusters.
The crew try to use the thrusters to prevent Calvin from
entering these openings, but their attempts fail and the
station loses too much fuel. The ISS enters a decaying orbit,
which will eventually cause the station to burn up in Earth's
atmosphere. Pilot Sho Murakami informs the crew that they
need to use the remaining fuel to get back into a safe orbit,
but the attempt would allow Calvin back into the station. The
crew then plan to make Calvin dormant by sealing
themselves into one module and venting the atmosphere
from the rest of the station.
When Hugh enters cardiac arrest, the crew realize that
Calvin was feeding off Hugh's leg. Having grown into a
larger tentacled creature, Calvin attacks the remainder of
the crew. Sho seals himself in a sleeping pod as Calvin
attempts to crack the glass and consume him. David and
the quarantine officer Miranda North use Hugh's corpse as
bait to lure Calvin away from Sho and trap it in a module to
deprive it of oxygen.
Having received a distress call prior to the damage to the
ISS communication system, Earth sends a Soyuz
capsule as a fail-safe plan to push the station into deep
space. The capsule docks with the station and starts
pushing it into deep space. Believing the situation to be a
rescue mission, Sho leaves his pod and rushes to board the
arriving ship, forcing open the capsule's hatch; Calvin then
attacks him and the Soyuz crew. The encounter causes a
docking breach that results in the capsule detaching and
crashing into the ISS, killing Sho and the Soyuz pilots. David
and Miranda, the only survivors, now realize that the
incident has again caused them to enter a decaying orbit.
Aware that Calvin could survive re-entry, David recalls two
escape pods, planning to lure Calvin into one pod and pilot it
into deep space, allowing Miranda to escape to the other
pod.
David lures Calvin into his pod while Miranda enters her pod,
creating a black box message notifying the world about her
colleagues' deaths and containing instructions to destroy
Calvin should he make his way to Earth. Both then launch
their pods at the same time. As they make their way, one of
the pods hits debris and is knocked off course. In David's
pod, Calvin attacks him as he struggles to send the pod into
deep space. The pods then separate; the earthbound pod
performs a controlled re-entry and lands in the ocean near a
boat with two Vietnamese fishermen. As they approach and
look inside the pod, it is revealed to be that of David, who is
encased in a web-like substance. Meanwhile, due to
damage sustained from hitting the debris, Miranda's
navigation system malfunctions and fails, and she screams
as her pod is sent hurtling into deep space. Back on Earth,
despite David's warning not to attempt a rescue, the
fisherman open the hatch as more boats arrive.
In many ways, fictional scientists have been paying
for the sins of Victor Frankenstein ever since the 1812
novel was released — with scientists portrayed as
meddlers who bring disaster upon the world. The
scientists of Life, in many ways, are no different.
Sci-fi horror films tap specifically into fears related to
science, with worries rooted in real-world current
events. Movie physicists had a particularly hard time
after World War II (see: Godzilla). Movie biologists,
meanwhile, with a few notable exceptions such as last
year's The Martian, have had a pretty consistently
poor cinematic track record. One of the reasons for
this is that the real fears so often embodied by movie
biologists are only tangentially related to things that
real scientists have actually done — which brings us
to Life and Frankenstein.
In Life, Calvin only goes from friendly space Flubber
to bloodthirsty blob-monster after exobiologist Dr.
Hugh Derry (Ariyon Bakare) decides it’s a good idea
to try electrocuting the extraterrestrial out of a trauma-
induced dormancy. The movie tries to present this,
and Derry’s general treatment of Calvin, as a sort of
hubristic, “scientific curiosity gone too far” sort of
situation, as sci-fi horror so often does. The issue is
that there is nothing scientific about Derry’s fateful
decision, only what we might call “Frankensteinian”—
and not even the James Whale thunder-lightning “It’s
alive!” Frankenstein, but the Mary Shelley original: “I
collected the instruments of life around me, that I
might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing
that lay at my feet.”

Let’s zap it to make it do stuff isn’t the rationale of a

scientific mind made dangerous by ethical and/or
philosophical nearsightedness (as evidenced by the
parallel of the character requiring glasses), it’s the
attitude one might expect from children unsupervised
at a zoo. Calvin goes dormant as a result of extreme,
short-term environmental stress caused by a technical
malfunction in the lab. Attempting to coax an
organism out of a stress-induced dormancy by
introducing a new stressor, especially when the
physiology of said organism is still largely unknown, is
pretty impossible to justify from a scientific angle —
unless, of course, you are viewing science through
the lens of Frankenstein, as the media often does,
whether that be in movies or news articles that
mention the fictional scientist when discussing
controversial topics from GMO crops to stem cell
research.
But making Frankenstein the poster boy for the
dangers of science is flawed; he represents science
about as much as Scientology.
And though “Beware of science” might be what many
take away from narratives from Frankenstein to Life,
there is a fundamental issue here: stories about the
horrors of science very often make use of objectively
bad science.
The core of science is the scientific method. Curiosity
might fuel it, but it is the scientific method that actually
defines the machine. It's the skeleton which gives
science its shape. When science fiction takes this
skeleton away, it’s no wonder that what’s left behind
is so often a nightmarish, misshapen monster.
Science is all about protocol, but take a minute to try
to think of a sci-fi horror film that doesn’t involve
protocol breach. It’s not impossible, but it might take
you a while. Life does actually attempt to address the
importance of protocol in science, such as when
CDC-sourced Quarantine Officer Dr. Miranda North
(Rebecca Ferguson) takes issue with Derry’s
treatment of Calvin (“this will never be a controlled
experiment”). It also puts one of the most significant
protocol breaches in the hands of engineer Roy
Adams (Ryan Reynolds), who is characterized as an
affable handyman type instead of being more
traditionally “science-coded” — an important
distinction between Life and Alien, which handed the
fate-sealing protocol breach to Science Officer Ash
(even if he is ultimately revealed to be a fraud in more
ways than one). So perhaps there are some subtle
allusions to this issue, but ultimately Life still presents
us with the dangers of bad science without really
identifying it as such.
All of this is not to say that there is not a “dark side” to
science, only that many sci-fi horror narratives,
with Lifebeing the most recent, do not really show the
dangers of science, but rather the dangers of science
done poorly. “Disasters can happen when people are
bad at their jobs” is less of a critique of the nature of
scientific inquiry and more of a basic truism.
At multiple points in Life, the characters consider who
among them is to blame for the Calvin situation. They
seem to agree on a sort of shared responsibility,
which is quite noble, but perhaps unwarranted — after
all, they only stumbled when they followed in the
footsteps of Dr. Frankenstein.