Review: LIFE Is a Captivating, Terrifying, and Entertaining Sci-Fi Film
I’m not going to lie, I wasn’t really looking forward to Life. After seeing Arrival last year, I didn’t think there was much another sci-fi alien movie could offer. But I enjoy the sci-fi genre, and the cast of this movie simply can’t be ignored: Ryan Reynolds, Jake Gyllenhaal, Hiroyuki Sanada, and Rebecca Furguson. So needless to say, my interest was piqued.
The movie starts out with the only exposition being some voiceover delivered by one of the crew members. We jump right into a retrieval mission where it appears that some debris of some sort has been gathered from Mars and it is up to this crew of astronauts (a few of whom are played by the awesome actors aforementioned) to study it and search for signs of life. And what do you know, they find it.
But things quickly take a turn for the worst (of course) when we humans try once again to meddle with something we don't fully understand. I don't want to give away too much; I think it’s important to go into this movie knowing as little as possible, but I will say that this film is not for the squeamish.
Life is perhaps the most unoriginal space movie I've seen in a long time. It borrows heavily from the classic sci-fi film Alien, and it also gave off some vibes reminiscent of Gravity as well. I was worried about unoriginality going into this movie because Hollywood isn’t exactly in the business of groundbreaking storytelling these days. But Life felt like it was just different enough and so well-done that even though it was obviously a rehashing of some old themes, I was totally into it.
One of the things that made this film so great was the special effects. They were phenomenal. Again, I don’t want to give anything away, but I was in awe. Turns out zero gravity blood is pretty awesome.
Picky people might overanalyze this movie, find a bunch of plot holes, and criticize it for being too unoriginal, but when I watch a movie, the first thing I look for is whether or not it was entertaining. And that’s exactly what this movie did. I was captivated, I was terrified, I was even grossed out a bit. And if that’s not entertainment, I don’t know what is.