Despite its stellar cast, Life fails to be out-of-this world.
A team (including Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, and Ryan Reynolds) aboard the International Space Station receives soil samples from Mars. They discover a living organism among the samples, and after further tests, it begins to grow. They name the organism Calvin, and as he grows, he also becomes increasingly violent. Calvin starts to attack the crew members as a means to survive.
Through watching the trailer, Life is clearly not an imaginative, nor unique, space movie. However, it does portray itself as a wildly exciting space-thriller. It is not. It is solidly mediocre in every aspect. This is incredibly disappointing based on all the talent involved in the film. The best thing about Life is the press junket interviews of Jake Gyllenhaal and Ryan Reynolds.
Related: Check out this Hypable article about the Life interviews
Life tries to do and be so many different things that every attempt dilutes the others. It mostly wants to be a horror movie, but it is not that scary. In between the jump scares, it tries to build suspense but it moves too slowly. It attempts to be philosophical, contemplating life, but feels too silly. It tries to introduce interesting characters but none of them actually matter. Life could have been incredibly entertaining if it tried to focus more on one of these, but it just becomes aimless.
In all reality, Life is not all that scary. There are maybe a couple of successful jump scares, but even those are still fairly lame. It also does not help that Calvin looks pretty silly. Life had the potential to be a great suspense film; unfortunately this does not work out well. There are definitely individual scenes that are scary or suspenseful, but not the movie as a whole.
Life partially fails in suspense and horror, because it spends too much time trying to be philosophical. This, in part, does not work because the dialogue is hard to understand. It also does not work because it does not really have a point. All of these conversations seem to just slow down the action and are not written clearly enough. Life tries to have a message, but there really is not one definitive message. The closest seems to be that it is trying to say don’t be curious, especially due to the tagline “be careful what you search for.”
It seems impossible for a cast of this caliber to allow Life to be a bad movie, which they do not, but it is still disappointing. Everyone in this cast does a fine job with what they are given. They are still able to make cheesy lines sincere, but they do seem wasted on this movie.
Life takes its time to introduce the so-called horror. It moves at a much slower pace than the rest of the movie, which could divide the audience. Nothing really happens in the beginning besides the introduction of the characters and the situation. I personally would have been completely fine if the entire movie was just watching the lives of these astronauts. I also would have been fine if the beginning would have been cut out, getting to the action much faster. As it is, the beginning did not work that well because it felt like it was manipulating the audience to empathize with the characters. This does not actually work because the outcome of the movie is too obvious from the first trailer.
Life begins with an incredibly impressive long-take shot. Despite the fact that long-takes are difficult in any circumstance, Life has the added challenge of imitating zero gravity. Zero gravity is not so much of a novelty anymore after Gravity, but it is still noteworthy how it was used throughout the entire film, especially with an ensemble cast.
Life just feels incredibly unnecessary. There is nothing that makes it stand out from any other space thrillers to justify its existence. However, I am still incredibly grateful for its existence due to the amazing interviews.
Grade: B-
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