If you choose between seeing this and Life (2017)... choose this instead.
Let me explain why.
George Miller, master storyteller and director of the Mad Max films, has said that audiences have learned how to "speed read" films, citing the number of cuts between the earlier Mad Max movies and the latest, Fury Road: Wikipedia claims that Fury Road contains 2,700 cuts while The Road Warrior had only 1,200.
I bring this up because Zygote offers us the very same setup as films like Alien, Aliens, John Carpenter's The Thing, Event Horizon, and even Life, of this year: Zygote is set in a derelict and remote station featuring workers being stalked by a horrible creature. Zygote is superior to Life only because it is much more condensed. I'm judging Zygote by Life because they came out the same year and Life has failed to evolve.
No, I'm not giving preference to Zygote over Life just because Zygote is shorter-- Zygote is condensed. As the Mad Max movies have evolved to suit the abilities of "speed reading" audiences, Zygote offers us everything Alien, Life, and The Thing offers without dragging out the entire show.
The "trapped in space with a horrible monster" genre has been done to death. Zygote wisely gives us all of the feelings of isolation, fear, claustrophobia, and wonder that the genre offers us in just over 20 minutes. "Life" was overlong rehash of a film we've seen more than a dozen times now. Perhaps Zygote-- or rather, its format-- is the evolution of the genre.
A criticism: the opening exposition is weak, just the male lead talking and explaining the setup. And he speaks in such a gravelly-growly "please take me seriously, I'm a hardened veteran, no really" kind of way I wished there was an option for subtitles.
In any case, props to the FX department of Zygote-- they did a wonder creating their monster. Now THERE is a scary creature I'd rate in the same category of creepy-cool as Alien's xenomorph. Not Life's "Calvin..." that thing looked like a lizard with a four feelers.
