Life
Can you imagine we have a good Sci Fi movie without a Wookiee or Vulcan in sight?
Jake Gyllenhaal stars as Dr. David Jordan – one of six scientists
and astronauts on the International Space Station. They heroically have
retrieved a space capsule containing all sorts of material from Mars,
including actual soil from the planet’s surface.
After investigating it further, Hugh Derry (Ariyon Bakare) discovers a
single cell organism, making this team the first to discover
extraterrestrial life.
Discovering life in space is one of the greatest achievements of all
time, but, after an accident in the lab, this single cell organism is
growing bigger, getting smarter and becoming angrier and more dangerous
by the minute, which puts everyone’s life in danger.
Who will live?
Who will die?
Life is a nice mixture of being part Sci Fi and part creepy horror film, which makes it an homage to Alien, or a massive rip off begging for a lawsuit.
Director Daniel Espinosa takes full advantage of the setting’s
general feeling of isolation and the terror this organism, which
resembles a slimy octopus, causes as it slowly creeps around every
corner and pops up out of nowhere like a Hitchcock character looking to
commit a crime.
He perfectly escalates the horror scene by scene as we witness the alien lifeform becoming more and more violent by the minute.
However, Life needs better storytelling. For as brilliant as
the moments are as we see the alien wreaking havoc throughout the
station, we never get much of a reason to care about the characters.
Everyone seems to fit a typical role and any attempts to craft some
sort of sympathy for each one never extends beyond one scene, so death
scenes and massive life or death decisions never have the intended
emotional impact. Maybe this is because we have too many characters to
give any of them enough room to grab your attention (even if Ryan
Reynolds steals the show whenever he is on screen).
You have a great cast, but Life is a movie wandering from cool
scene to cool scene without much grounding it, especially as we get
stuck with a couple extra scenes that are superfluous at best.
Life is rated R for language
throughout, some sci-fi violence and terror.
103 Minutes
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