Life Review

I can imagine Columbia Pictures and Skydance Media were sitting in a meeting room when news broke out about Ridley Scott directing a new Alien movie, and then scrambled to find any monster-in-space script to beat its release date. Unfortunately for audiences, this is the script they dusted of.

Now look, I am usually a pushover for these "haunted house in space" movies, but that is only when they are either "good" or "so-bad-they're-good." The new movie, "Life," falls into the "dreadfully boring" category, stealing not only from the "Alien" movies but also "The Thing," "Gravity," and somehow "Deep Rising," with a monster with a comparable number of mucky tentacles. Compared to other films in the genre, "Life" fails to leave any impression. On its own, makes you wish you were watching those ".. other films in the genre."

The plot concerns a space station and its six astronauts collecting a species sample from Mars, the first proof of extraterrestrial life. Hugh Derry (Ariyon Barkare) is the biologist, who spends most of turning knobs and dials like how I imagine a real biologist does. He is in charge of studying the creature, locked behind the industrial doors of the hulking spacecraft. But after a slight glitch with the atmospheric pressure valves, the little alien that could goes dormant. Determined not to lose what could be the greatest scientific discovery, he zaps the alien, named "Calvin" by a child on Earth who won a contest to name it (this scene takes place in NYC, so you will need both hands to count all the product placement). But that begins a series of stupid actions by our cast, as the organism reacts by clamping down on Hugh's hand, crushing his bones and then escaping from his petri dish. Engineer Rory Adams (Ryan Reynolds, who somehow gets top billing despite, well, read on) breaks the sealed door open to rescue Hugh from the tiny monster, but as he tosses the floppy-handed biologist out of the room, Calvin latches onto his leg, and Dr. David Jordan (Jake Gyllenhaal) locks him in the lab. Rory fights back, but Calvin does not play nice, and soon reduces the secondary character to a limp mass in a particularly bloody fashion. If you think this is a spoiler, don't; the characters are hardly developed enough to feel any emotion other than disgust when they drool blood from their mouths.

Calvin then escapes the room from the sprinkler system, and is now somewhere in the ship. He changes shape each time we see him, though unlike the Xenomorph from the aforementioned franchise, the slimy creature just looks bigger, and more slimy. He resembles an octopus with all his tentacle-esque legs, and just flops across walls and through shafts with none of the grace of a true movie villain.

The rest of the film deals with cut-off communications, low fuel and the lack of oxygen, as well as other, all too familiar, points in the plot; I am surprised the writers did not have ship's engine stall with the gooey monster hot in pursuit. There is not a single moment that filled me with wonder, never did Calvin do or look like something unexpected, never did a shot of space leave me in awe, and not one performance was above average. Every single decision was wrong-headed; even the film's ending left me with more unease than it did amazement.

Ah yes, the ending. There is a twist (that isn't a spoiler, is it?), and I will not say what it is, except that I did not expect it, and it is the only moment in the film where I felt it took a risk. But even with that said, it is a glaring convenient conclusion; just think to yourself, would things have been the same had the fishermen spoke English?