Life (2017)

Life is one of those rare big Hollywood horror films with some major star power behind it.  One can easily make the comparison of this movie to the classic Alien.  Just like that film, this is a sci-fi thriller with heavy horror elements involved.  The marketing maybe tried to present a more sci-fi focused film and with it's star power they likely wanted to push for a more diverse audience.  The bloody poster artwork I posted for example was not used in most marketing and only in certain regions, as a more cleaner non violent version of the poster was used in most places to push more the sci-fi feeling of the film.  But anyways, how the movie was marketed is not important.

*poke poke*

Life is set in a modern like space setting aboard an international space station orbiting Earth.  The crew pick up a probe returning from Mars with a sample of the first evidence of life from another planet.  Of course, we all know how this is going to go.  Life has all the trappings of your typical cliche scientists discovering an alien life form movie.  There's dozens of these movies, all of varying quality, but Life does prove to be a quality production that just has a few issues.

We can't hear you... haven't you seen Alien 3? 

The cast is both impressive and sadly wasted.  With big names like Jake Gyllenhaal and Ryan Reynolds, you would expect more, but sadly the movie doesn't really use them enough to matter.  The character in most part all just are kind of boring and lack much personality.  From the get go we are introduced to them just being their astronaut selves, none with any real development to make them stand out.  With such stars you would hope they would have more to work with but it's all very basic working on the station and then some screaming, roles which could have really been performed by anyone so the casting feels kind of wasted on this script.  You also have our main female lead who just is so incredibly boring, and comes off as ice cold robot the entire time.

Captain Boring, reporting for duty

Life starts a bit slow and the characters again don't exactly help here, but once the bad stuff starts going down the film provides some gripping content.  The confines of a space station always make for excellent claustrophobic space terror, and unlike most sci-fi alien creature flicks, Life has a more grounded in reality setting which provides additional tension in my opinion.  The lack of gravity and technology makes our cast more vulnerable and with how dangerous space is, having a creature running around hunting you makes it all the more scarier.  The suspense as the creature stalks the crew throughout the station is what makes this film work.  The film may not be graphic with gore, but still will make you wince at some of the deaths and what some of the crew end up going through.

The creature while interesting at times, also can be pretty boring.  Predator and Alien show us how important a good creature design is, and sadly the alien life form in Life is not that compelling for most of the film.  Being all CGI also always takes away from a creature's design to me, but at least the effects in this film are quite good.  The creature does evolve, and really it doesn't take on an interesting visual identity till much later in the film.  But even so, Life still provides a good time and worth a viewing.  It won't blow anyone away and it's nothing new, but nothing wrong with that as it's very competent at what it sets out to do.  The ending is also great, but I rather not go into that......