Life (2017) [Blu-ray]
Horror | Sci-Fi | Thriller

Tagline: Be careful what you search for.

A team of scientists aboard the International Space Station discover a rapidly evolving life form, that caused extinction on Mars, and now threatens the crew and all life on Earth.

Storyline: Six astronauts aboard the space station study a sample collected from Mars that could provide evidence for extraterrestrial life on the Red Planet. The crew determines that the sample contains a large, single-celled organism - the first example of life beyond Earth. But..things aren't always what they seem. As the crew begins to conduct research, and their methods end up having unintended consequences, the life form proves more intelligent than anyone ever expected. Written by ElDiomedes

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Martin Liebman, June 18, 2017 Art imitates life, and Life imitates movies like Alien. It's not a poor man's recreation of Ridley Scott's genre masterpiece, but it is a derivative facsimile thereof. The movie offers little of creative substance, serving instead as a perfectly serviceable and largely entertaining but fairly hollow nuts-and-bolts tale of a handful of science-types trapped on board a space station with a deadly, evolving alien creature. That's really about it. The film, from Director Daniel Espinosa (Safe House), satisfies all technical requirements and delivers a decent enough time-killing watch, but audiences should be prepared for a film that yields little in the way of serious drama, characterization, gore, or genre chills. It has no staying power beyond its time on the screen. Indeed, "serviceable" describes it to a "T."

The crew of the Nostromo, er, the International Space Station, brings aboard a wayward probe that holds precious samples from an expedition to Mars. It's a bumpy, risky coupling, but the crew manages to haul it in intact. What they find will change the world. Exobiologist Hugh Derry (Ariyon Bakare) discovers evidence of life, a single-cell organism that quickly multiplies itself into a larger creature. As the rest of the crew -- Ekaterina Golovkina (Olga Dihovichnaya), Dr. David Jordan (Jake Gyllenhaal), Dr. Miranda North (Rebecca Ferguson), Sho Murakami (Hiroyuki Sanada), and Rory Adams (Ryan Reynolds) -- observes, the creature attaches itself to Derry's hand. It quickly becomes clear that the creature does not come in peace and that the crew faces a grave, unstoppable danger, and preventing its travel to Earth suddenly seems more important than saving their own lives.

Make no mistake, Life offers good, basic R-rated Sci-Fi entertainment. Though it doesn't push any boundaries -- not in terms of genre cadence, violence, or characterization -- it maneuvers through the basics with a spit-and-polish sheen that does well enough to mask the film's structural deficiencies, which are many. Chief amongst them is characterization. The handful of ISS astronauts are given rather rudimentary backstories -- one is paralyzed, one is overextending his stay, one is a new father -- but none of it truly matters in the grand scheme of things. They're little more than instruments for the movie's use, characters who are both fodder for the creature and individuals who have the training and wherewithal to use ship's systems to their advantage to battle the creature. But Life usually struggles to get out of a comfort zone of predictability, if not predictability in its own, unique storyline certainly predictability within the greater genre construction. Right down to the final shot there's precious little ingenuity and nothing to keep the audience on its toes. The film is happy to just offer a new coat of paint on a standby genre, which is fine, and it works well enough in that regard.

The movie is technically sound, though, again, not much of a modern marvel. Creature design is neither here nor there. It's not memorable in the least and it's not particularly menacing. It's sort of like an enhanced face-hugger. Various external shots of the station, both beauty shots and in moments of peril, are well done. Espinosa and DP Seamus McGarvey commendably make use of the cramped locations, squeezing out intensive visual drama from just a few spaces for operation in the ISS. It's even difficult to tell what's real and what's been digitally inserted or enhanced. Performances aren't particularly compelling, but then again, neither is the script. The cast often lacks serious emotion, failing to convey deep, sincere fear, for example, even as they verbalize their terror. There's little here to excite in the moment and even less over time.

Life may not captivate, but it offers just enough entertainment value to keep the viewer interested. It's as predictable as the day is long and the performances (and the script) are a drag, but the filmmakers have injected the movie with just enough of a technical achievement and sheen to keep it moving, assuming one can get past the overwrought opening act. A classic watch-and-forget, the movie will likely only be remembered when it's seen in a collection of films that tried, but failed, to capture the same magic as Alien. Sony's Blu-ray is much more impressive than the movie. Video is excellent, audio is reference-worthy, and the extras are fair. Worth a rental.

[CSW] -2.2- I couldn't have said it any better than this reviewer:
An average cliché ridden movie that lacked originality. Stealing obvious scenes from Alien, Life is a boring look at science fiction clichés - one after another. Like Alien, you have the breach of protocol that allows the alien to attack the rest of the crew. That usual cliché where someone ignores the warnings and opens the door to let everything happen. In reality - the lab would have been sterilized, but then that is the end of the movie. Like Alien, the mad scientist (android in Alien, Hugh in Life) protects the alien even though it is killing everyone else. The usual dumb cliché. Life Alien, there is/are escape craft, but no everyone can fit. Life a space program would have something that only 2/6 of the crew could survive. Another cliché. Like all bad science fiction movies - the alien who has never seen technology, never seen humans, never been exposed to computers, etc - somehow knows the entire ship, knows how to shut down communications, knows everything. Something that started as a single cell organism - no matter how many neurons it has - can never just wake up and know how to manipulate and run a space station.

[V4.0-A5.0] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box


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