The International Space Station has collected samples of the surface of Mars and carefully studies them in the safety of space before returning to earth. The crew is made up of all the usual suspects: the scientist who is overly emotional, the guy who likes the isolation of space, the captain who feels responsible for everything, the foreigner with a skill for comuters, and the jokester who's there for laughs ala Ryan Reynolds (played by Ryan Reynolds, of course). They find a single cell frozen amongst the dirt, the first evidence of life on another planet. Slowly they raise the temperature and try to wake it up. I assume we all know that is finally comes to.
What ensues is an attempt at horror along the vein of Alien or maybe a thriller like Gravity. We've known since the 1970's that space can be an extraordinarily scary setting to be trapped with a monster, but for some reason this movie doesn't seem to realize why. The creature (named "Calvin" by school children on earth) slowly grows into a part-octopus part-easter lily and begins to kill crew members one by one. The only surprise I can say is that the person who dies first wasn't my first guess... Maybe third or fourth. In Alien, the scares came from darkness and our inability to see the alien for long stretches of the movie. When it is finally revealed to have grown 10 feet long, that is terrifying. In Life, the monster grows to maybe the size of a house cat and then stops. Yes, it will eat you alive, but where's the menace in being killed by something that more closely resembles a potted plant?
I do mention Gravity as another film that clearly influenced the look here, all the way down to the detailed destruction of the Space Station in a noiseless panic. Even the score is a pitiful copy of the shimmery sounds that made Gravity so special. Not often do I actively notice film music for being bad, but the one-note sound from the composer made it sound like some of the instruments lost their sheet music mid recording. The astronauts float in space here with wirework as convincing as a Peter Pan stage production. In the weightlessness of space we can all but see the actors stressing to keep balanced and it hasn't been since Apollo 13 that space travel actually felt real (in that film mind you they actually created zero-gravity sets). There's a moment when a character pulls their mangled hand out of a glove and it falls limp to the ground. Why does their hand fall to the ground in space? Probably because the actor forgot to pretend like it was weightless.
The ending of the film is grim and depressing in a way you would expect from a movie as shoddy. The action is so dark and the alien is so tiny that it's hard to keep track of what's going on. Fortunately by this point we are too numb to notice. For the few surviving crew members, we kind of wish the alien would just eat them and let the movie end a few minutes early. They're not making a sequel to this, so in the end who really cares?
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