MOVIE REVIEW – Life is a science-fiction horror escapade released by Columbia Pictures into the wilderness, the movie is just two months away from Alien: Covenant, and I had high hopes for this one. Mainly due to the double star power of Ryan Reynolds, and Jake Gyllenhaal this seemed like a sure-fire success in my eyes. Then we sat down to watch the movie, and I was horrified! … not at the monster initially, but just how basic the entire movie felt.

 

Sure, you can say to me with a bloody ax near my face that: “Horror movies are dumb!”, But then I can point that axe to last year’s Don’t Breathe, 2015’s Crimson Peak, and this year’s Get Out. While the star power is here, I was waiting for a breakout moment. Sadly this latest horror movie has decided that instead of treating the audience as smart people, they just threw whatever clichés they could find and hope for the best. I don’t think they hoped well enough…

Matt Damon’s Corpse Retrieval

Mission Pilgrim in 2017 can gather a single cell from Mars and is heading back to Earth so that the scientists on the ISS can study it. All neat and tidy, the mission is made up of Dr. Davis Jordan (Jake Gyllenhaal), Dr. Miranda North (Rebecca Ferguson), Rory Adams (Ryan Reynolds), Sho Kendo (Hiroyuki Sanada), Hugh Derry (Ariyon Bakare), and finally Katerina Golovkina (Olga Dihovichnaya). Their mission finally begins when they take the sample aboard the station and start to study it. Of course, all necessary safety precautions are done, and they are using robotic arms to study.. oh no wait for you.. you’re just going to keep touching it aren’t they.. fine!

Sadly even before the blood, gore, and entrails start flowing through Zero G, the script writer, and director decided to add tiny little backstories to the characters. Well, sort of they does not add or subtract anything from the overall depth of the characters since all of them are a paper weight.

Davis is a misanthrope who loves the emptiness of space, Miranda is a blank slate, Rory is the cocky badass space captain of ISS. Sho is the person who we will suppose to feel sorry for since he just had a kid back on Earth, Hugh is depressed and treats the sample like a Junior Dr. Frankenstein, then there’s the Russian lady who.. does stuff?

The characters in this movie as mentioned above are borderline one-dimensional which is a shame since Jake, and Ryan is good actors. Sadly not even they could have salvaged the script which was loaded with clichés, and one-liners that bore me to death. All of the characters also act in the most cliché way possible, and that is a problem especially when our characters are scientists, and people with PhDs. I could chalk it up to the movie being a horror film, but with the dialogue being so bafflingly bad, and the character motivations so bland it is hard to relax and enjoy the film.

Gut Puncher!

Ah well even if the characters are generic and one-note the movie can provide clever and disgusting deaths for our characters. Since there are not that many characters, the scenes had to be shot as tense, and frightening moments that works for the first two instances. The movie is incredibly well shot, and the violence is entirely shown, and even disturbing in the first half of the film. I was impressed with how one character’s death scene was handled, and how the Russian Cosmonauts against the alien After those two it seems that the scriptwriter and director ran out of ideas, and we are left with generic scenes. Even the signs of good scenes are quickly snuffed out, unfortunately, and those scenes are few and far between throughout the entire 103 minutes.

The monster of the movie was well designed and was terrifying enough to hold my attention throughout the film. It evolves from a tiny cell to something much more gruesome at the end. Sadly even here the Monster’s logic gets thrown out the window a few times. The movie shifts the rules towards the monster and leaves a few plot holes after it.

The layout of the ISS is also great, and the location is very claustrophobic during the scenes, although it has been “upgraded“ to be a bit more futuristic for the audience. The sound design for the movie was also top-notch and was able to allow the scenes to be even tenser (when directed properly). It was odd that while some parts of the station were profoundly advanced (even though the movie takes place in 2017), the failures of the crew could have been twisted in a way that would have made sense.

In Space, I Can Laugh

Life was a movie that I had high expectations, and it crashed and burned regarding script and storytelling. Sure you’ll get a cheap laugh or two, or maybe a slight tinge of terror when seeing the monster, but this is, unfortunately, a below average movie. Not worth the time and effort, and it is sad to see that after many great horror movies for the past year Life will not be part of this new renaissance of horror films.

 -Dante-