Life is essentially a 21st-century clone of Alien just minus the smarts or thrills that masterpiece contained. Ridley Scott’s 1979 watershed film has nothing to worry about with this apparent clone.
It stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, and Ryan Reynolds as a crew of astronauts aboard the International Space Station who come in contact and capture a mysterious life form on Mars and decide to study it to see if it’s the first scientific evidence of extraterrestrial life.
Of course after a while, the life form inevitably comes to life and presents itself as a threat to the crew who to have fight for their own survival. I didn’t find this creature convincing or threatening and it comes off as nothing more than a liquid octopus.
The creature in this film has the same M.O. as other space creatures do: Dividing up and picking off the astronauts one at a time while the crew brainstorms endless plots in order to kill it. After a while, it begins to feel totally repetitious.
Gyllenhaal, Ferguson, and Reynolds are great, likable actors, but they are stuck in material that oftentimes feels sluggish and occasionally narcoleptic. It’s marginally thrilling but there’s very little that is really suspenseful or even surprising and the ending is anticlimactic. I can’t imagine how a sequel would fare much better.
While we’re making comparisons to Alien, maybe the filmmakers can check out Scott’s Alien: Covenant due out this summer to see how it’s really done. Sadly, this “Life” isn’t good.
Grade: C+
(Rated R for language throughout, some sci-fi violence, and terror.)
