IMDb listing
CNS/USCCB (J. Mulderig) review
Los Angeles Times (K. Turan) review
RogerEbert.com (K. Turan) review
AVClub (A.A. Dowd) review
Life [2017] (directed by Daniel Espinosa, screenplay by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick) is perhaps best understood as a SciFi story whose creators really didn't know what they wanted:
On the one hand, they wanted the respectability of well-made recent SciFi films with thoughtful / believable scenarios like Gravity [2013], The Martian [2015] and even Contagion [2011]. On the other hand, they invented a monster -- the AV Club's reviewer A.A. Dowd (above) calls it "A Space Octopus" -- that really deserves to be in a B-movie.
Now don't get me wrong, I generally like / review favorably high budget fantastic stories like those Marvel Superhero Universe. I even enjoyed -- smiled from ear-to-ear actually -- watching, mesmerized, two races of GIANT Transformer Robots SMASHING THINGS (buildings, cars, everything really) LEFT-AND- RIGHT while THEY BEAT the daylights out of EACH OTHER on-and-all-over the streets of Chicago in Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon [2011].
But this film didn't seem to fit in any of the these three SciFi universes: the respectable / believable if generally Dystopic kind; the "attack of the race of intelligent lobsters" low-budget B-movie kind, or the GIANT high-budget Super Hero / Super Monster / Super Villain kind.
So what's the film about? Well, researchers on the International Space Station successfully capture a sample-return pod arriving to Mars, and begin analyzing the sample for evidence of life. Well, something starts to grow. Initially it seems to be growing like a colony of single celled organisms but, to the researchers horror, it coalesces into what becomes a very smart (and very hungry) multi-apendaged "space-octopus" -- everyone of its cells is BOTH a muscle and a nerve cell ...
Well, needless to say ... much ensues ...
I would have settled for "a space virus" ;-) ... The space octopus proved just weird if, I suppose, "really really frightening."
Anyway, it just seems that the creators of this film really couldn't settle on the monster that they wanted to present. So ... sigh ... not exactly a "must see"
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