Movie Reaction: Life

Formula: Alien / Gravity

Some films are more concerned with effectiveness than novelty. It's very hard to be the first or the original. When that isn't an option, getting it right can be an equally noble goal. No one is pretending that Life doesn't look an awful lot like a bunch of other movies. The hope is that it is done so well, that no one cares.

Life begins when the 6 person crew of an international space station retrieve ground samples from a Mars probe. In that sample is a single cell that they manage to bring back to life. People all over the world rejoice and name this evidence of life on another planet Calvin, because, why not? Soon after reanimating Calvin, he starts growing and getting stronger. It's hardly a spoiler to tell you that, eventually, Calvin turns on the crew and leaves a lot of dead bodies.

It's a pretty small cast, since almost all of it takes place on the space station. I recognized Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, and Ryan Reynolds. I didn't recognize Hiroyuki Sanada, Olga Dihovichnaya, and Ariyon Bakare. No one stood out above the others though. Ryan Reynolds is about the only person I couldn't see being played by any other actor, which I don't mean as a slam on any of the cast. It's a movie about survival, not characters. Granted, better fleshed out characters would've certainly helped the film to stand out.

It really is hard for me to not talk about Life in terms of the films it reminds me of. It's a mission from Mars (The Martian), in which an alien attacks the crew (Alien). They are struggling to get back to Earth (Gravity), while also worrying about containing the creature (The Thing). As I alluded to earlier, all this pulling from other movies is fine. It just has to be done well. I can't say I bought into enough of the story. The lack of fail-safes in the space station seem poorly thought out. The crew had little regard for proper protocol (a common trope in this genre). Once it's revealed that Calvin can survive for an extended period of time outside the space station, he became a bogeyman who couldn't be stopped. In general, Life takes the easy way our a lot. It's easier to create conflict that the result of one unlucky break after another than it is to have people doing the right thing and still getting resistance. Life is a little too content going with what's easy for my taste. The characters weren't developed enough for me to invest in them, so that left a lot of focus on a story that showed its narrative hand too early and often. It's entertaining but not memorable.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend