68% on Rotten Tomatoes
Chloe's thoughts: It's alright;
Signed, sealed and recommended by Chloe;
Watch it in cinemas
Watch it if you: Want to see a pretty exciting movie about being trapped with a terrifying alien in space;
i.e. Want to see something quite similar to Alien;
A NASA crew are sent to retrieve and analyse a sample of Martian soil. When they discover that the sample harbours some microscopic life, the entire planet rejoices. Yet, they soon discover that otherwordly life may be the very thing to bring death to mankind.
Watching the trailer, I was expecting a very by-the-numbers rehash of Alien, but I ended up being pleasantly surprised by this.
Don't get me wrong, it is heavily inspired by Alien, but hey, we all loved Alien, right? So this was actually very entertaining.
It's also not as unoriginal as I thought it would be. With every Alien movie, we know what to expect: Astronauts come into contact with Alien. Alien bursts out of astronaut. Alien grows bigger. Alien goes on a killing spree. Everyone dies except the main female lead and maybe the robot on board. Cue the end credits.
While this is what you see and expect from all Alien movies, with Life, we don't know what this alien is like. We don't know how it will grow to look. We don't know what it's capable of, how it will kill people, and whether it will leave any people left to survive. And even if we do know that one person were to survive, we don't even know who the main character really is until towards the end. Of course, if you look at the posters and cast for this film, there are three contenders, but who, if any, will survive? This was cool because we got semi-equal amounts of focus on each character, and you actually feel for them when they die (rather than in Alien where their death happens off screen or you just don't care too much about them).
So I think it's refreshing in a way to have a movie like this where we expect to get elements of Alien, but we still don't know exactly what to expect.
It was nice to see they took a slightly different approach to certain things when comparing it to Alien.
Firstly, having a different type of alien concept thought up, will always be refreshing. The idea of how this alien moved around and even grew was cool. They had an interesting notion put forth about how all of the alien's cells were exactly the same, and did every single function. Which meant that every cell served the purpose of an eye, or a brain, or a heart. That was really intriguing, but unfortunately that all went out the window when they decided to give the Alien a face. It didn't need one, because every cell did everything, so that felt a bit stupid.
Also, there was a rumour going around that Life was a prequel to Venom, coming out in 2018 and also by Sony. Let me just say, it's totally not. And also, why would they make a prequel without even linking it back to the Spiderman series? That would be so stupid!
Secondly, this felt more grounded in reality than Alien; the alien came from Mars, we sent people to study the sample, humans the world over Skyped in to ask the astronauts questions, and the public even named the alien (surprisingly not Alieny McAlienface).
It's still a sci-fi movie, but it's not some crazy thing that could only happen in deep space hundreds or thousands of years later, like it all does in Alien. The stuff that happens seems like it actually could happen right now given our limited knowledge of extraterrestrial life, as well as the bureaucratic nature of space missions.
One different thing that I loved about this film were the death scenes. They were horrific and I liked how they each died in different sort of ways; it made each death quite surprising. The R-rating on this (in America, at least) is not just for the language, but for the violence as well.
The acting isn't all that phenomenal, but it's not a drama so I can't really fault the actors. They did well with what they had to work with. Glad to see Rebecca Ferguson again. Ryan Reynolds always a pleasure. Jake Gyllenhaal's character was a bit weird in this film though - not sure if I can back their decisions to make him have that sort of characterisation. It was, odd.
The visuals were great, although the opening scene is a bit messy and kind of all over the place when they were trying to make it a really epic long-sequence shot. The score at times seemed all over the place, and there were a few plot elements that were questionable.
But in the end it's still exciting, different, and hard to expect what will happen next. It has beautifully violent and gory death scenes, and is an enjoyable watch for fans of the alien in space sci-fi thriller genre, and even if you weren't, I think it would still be a decent watch.
Click for a few SPOILER notes:
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