Life Review: Well-paced but Forgettable

Life features a lean and well-paced thriller that plunges the audience headfirst into the story – a six-member crew discovers an organism on a sample extracted from Mars. Hugh Derry manages to coax the extraterrestrial back to life and enters the annals of human history.

The script doesn’t give much, but the actors make the most of the slivers of characterization. Ryan Reynolds plays another smart-ass character but brings levity to the plot-driven story while Jake Gyllenhaal turns pieces of his backstory into poignant human drama.

The rest though are as forgettable as the rest of the movie. Life is one part generic horror creature feature and one part generic monster movie in space with borrowed ideas from better movies – Alien and Gravity.

If you replaced Calvin with any other seemingly indestructible monster and the six-member crew with characters stuck somewhere remote and isolated, you get the same results.

Human beings poke around into things that they should have left alone and make stupid mistakes while plot conveniences keep the plot moving. At some point, a scientist electrocutes Calvin to wake him up out of hibernation and creates his own Frankenstein monster. Here, the bogeyman is so intelligent that it quickly learns how to use a glass implement even though it grew on a Petri dish.

Life doesn’t take any of its ideas somewhere compelling, creative, or even remotely original. A group of hapless individuals is stuck in a tomb in space with an alien. Shit happens. Eventually, Life devolves into a survival story of good-looking people you don’t care about with a predictable ending.

The movie does have some potent ideas somewhere.

In a brief moment, the movie talks about creation and destruction. From a purely scientific point of view, there’s no difference between a human being using livestock for sustenance with extraterrestrial life forms using another specie to evolve.

Unfortunately, this idea isn’t fully utilized or explored. Instead, it recycles other tried and tested ideas from its genre for a safe and neatly packaged monster movie in space.

Overall Life is still a serviceable and watchable flick with thrilling moments. At best, it can serve as a mediocre appetizer to Alien: Covenant.