Interestingly, this marks a year to the date I last posted anything here and coincidentally, both these posts are about Jake Gyllenhaal movies. I just finished watching the last 45 minutes or so of the movie "Life" from 2017, in which Jake Gyllenhaal acts.
It is a space movie; it seems that those were trendy in the 2010s and there are a number I'm aware of but haven't seen and don't really have much of a desire to: Interstellar, Gravity, The Martian, perhaps others. I actually wasn't really aware that Jake Gyllenhaal had been in a space movie; I possibly had been aware he was in a movie with this title but I didn't realize it was about space. He plays an astronaut on the space station.
The premise of the movie is that life has been found on Mars and astronauts on the space station are studying it. The Martian lifeform evolves rapidly and becomes a threat to human life, both the astronauts' and potentially people back on Earth if the alien being manages to get there. The alien (it its later form towards the end of the movie) resembles a space squid-tick and appears to feed off of human flesh/blood (which gives me the tick portion of "space squid-tick") and oxygen.
It's unclear how it survived on Mars without humans to feed on, or perhaps it evolved its taste for human flesh after the astronauts captured it. Maybe this was explained earlier in the movie. It's somewhat implied that it goes after humans since they contain oxygen in their bodies, but maybe it could also survive from other sources of oxygen, like an oxygen tank -- no human-devouring necessary? It's unclear if it absolutely needs to consume human flesh and blood or if it could survive off vegetarian oxygen, so to speak.
Thematically, (the last 45 minutes of) this movie reminded me somewhat of the Doctor Who episode "The Waters of Mars" which was the closest thing I could think of because I haven't watched any of the other space movies. I thought the latter portion of the movie was fairly interesting, although apparently this one may be somewhat of a ripoff of a previous space/alien movie. Which I haven't seen, nor have I watched other space movies, so to me personally this was a fairly fresh concept.
There's a bit of a twist to the ending, which I won't spoil too much here. It does make me contemplate what would happen in the real world if something like that ending were to happen -- the results/aftermath of the ending are not shown; the movie cuts off and leaves it up for imagination. There's an interesting discussion from the Verge about which parts of the movie are realistic and which are not. It features the lady who used to write a Jake Gyllenhaal newsletter.
One of the smaller details of the movie is the existence of things called "oxygen candles," which are handheld torches (in the British sense of the word) or wands that emit light and apparently oxygen as well when activated. The mechanism of action re: how the oxygen is produced and emitted from these oxygen candles is unclear, but they are somewhat reminiscent of reverse dry ice, if dry ice gave off oxygen instead of CO2.
If I ever get a chance I wouldn't mind watching the earlier part of the movie I missed, but I did rather enjoy the latter part even just by itself.
