Review of Life (2017) by Fireantus — 26 Mar 2017

Just to start this. 5 ouf ot 10 is not /BAD/ movie. It's just perfectly mediocre. And it is so! First of all, it's a 'By the Book Horror Sci-Fi' to the bone. It plays like if the director, actors and everyone who worked on this movie had a handy manual and a checklist of things to do to make a horror SF film. And so, it executes the tropes and cliches quite competently in this boring, predictable manner that made me yawn all the time...

So we have a bunch of diverse and utterly lifeless, boring characters on a space station. We have no time to get to like them or know them, so we have to rely on tokens and tropes. Like Rory, for example, who is a Spunky American Guy who acts instead of thinking! Or the guy who is a Nerd and he is all Nerdy and he loves the Alien and tells people it's not bad, even if it brakes his entire hand. Or the girl. Remember about the girl!

So our band of poor-ass pseudo-scientists find alien life! And of course it turns out to be super hostile. I can understand that and even approve of it - after all they treated it with a bit of electroshocks to 'stir it up', and that would piss off anyone... But of course it turns out that the space sperm medusa slash starfish is also super strong, super intelligent and pretty much completely indestructible, because hey - THAT'S SO SCARY! It is also called Calvin, so that's super scary...

Shenanigans begins, people die, space spermozoid grow up to be a killer and we can only sigh in mild resignation to see the classics that make such horrors possible, like everyone ignoring safety precausions and protocols, like all tech and gizmos being made of flimsy, wet cardboard or braking down after someone make a louder fart. How in mother of all coinky-dinkies things brakes down exactly when you need them to in order to make things Oh So Spooky.

Simply put it's a boring space horror that takes no risks and delivers a soup of things we all know that is not bad, but it is surely bland.