Review: “Life” (2017)

Every now and again, one goes to the movies and ends up watching a movie one knows nothing or very little about. This was the case when I watched the movie “Life” & sometimes one comes out disappointed and sometimes one comes out pleased with the cinematic experience. Thankfully, I was pleased with the cinematic experience I had watching this movie.

Men put up with a lot of shit in life. We put up with our relatives, our jobs and with the constant nagging and complaining of the women in our lives. Sometimes men need to be alone or most importantly,  men need to be left alone. This was my mood yesterday, so I decided to take off by myself and go to a Mall Food Court and sit down and have 6 tacos and a Frito burrito ( Fuck You Cholesterol Levels! )  by myself while I listened to some good Tunes from the past of my Pandora stations. Afterwards I decided that I was not done with my “Alone Time” and decided to see what was playing at the multiplex. I noticed this poster of the science fiction/ horror movie titled “Life” I had forgotten all about. Personally I have not seen too many ads for it, nor have I read or heard too much hype regarding the movie. And since I don’t have a fucking gun pointed at my head, then there’s no reason to watch “Beauty and the Beast”. So a ticket for “Life” I bought, plus popcorn & soda (Really.. Fuck You Cholesterol Levels!) & off I went.

The movie is set in the not-too-distant future. It’s about a group of astronauts on a mission to collect groundbreaking martian samples that could possibly lead to never before discoveries, like an alien life form. The ISS Crew is made up of Rory Adams(Ryan Reynolds), David Jordan(Jake Gyllenhaal), Miranda North(Rebecca Ferguson), Sho(Hiroyuki Sanada), Hugh Derry(Ariyon Bakare) & Ekaterina Golovkina(Olga Dihovichnaya).

The crew succeeds in completing the mission to collect samples from Mars and turns out one of those samples has life in the form of a microscopic cell. Back on earth the news is made public and they actually hold a contest in which a school gets to name the new discovery and the winning school decides to name the new lifeform & the students decide to give it the name “Calvin”. But as one must suspect in movies like this, the shit is about to hit the fan pretty soon and here it does.

I will try not to give too much away but still beware of spoilers. “Calvin” starts to grow rapidly & escapes the lab where it’s kept and gradually morphs into this kind of mollusk looking creature and becomes more intelligent as well. This movie takes place entirely  in the space station & I think it goes without saying that this film owes a lot to the movie “Alien” and obviously, it’s nowhere near as good as that movie. But a decent Creature Feature is a decent Creature Feature and this movie “Life” is that.

The movie is patient in it’s pacing and I think that will turn off in most likelihood a lot of younger audiences today that need everything to be fast cuts and shaky cam. Aside from Ryan Reynolds trademark sarcastic remarks here and there, the movie is not played for laughs, it’s played straight by the actors. The pacing of the movie picks up as the story goes along and in my opinion, ends up in a satisfactory manner. I know some people at the theater were not pleased with the ending of this movie, however I thought it stayed true to it’s horror roots and I liked the ending a lot.

This movie gave me a little bit of a 50s horror movie vibe as well also of a little bit of John Carpenter 80s “The Thing” horror vibe. In the sense that you know the characters are doomed and because of the setting and how the story unfolds.

This movie was directed by Daniel Espinosa who directed the movie “Child 44” and the Ryan Reynolds/ Denzel Washington movie “Safe House” and was written by the screen writing duo Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, who wrote “Zombieland” and “Deadpool”

This movie is not a masterpiece, however I get the feeling it might become one of those movies that becomes popular later down the road on DVD & TV by fans of movies like these. If you are one of those that cannot wait to see the the movie “Alien: Covenant” or movies like that and you need a “fix”, then I think this movie might be to your liking.

While “Beauty and the Beast”, “Boss Baby” and God knows what other shit is dominating american movie theaters today, this little science fiction/ horror B Movie in my opinion is worth a look.

7/10