Review of Life (2017) by Yakusokunoji — 20 Jun 2017

A totally inconsequential movie where you simply feel that they wanted to shock by an unexpected ending "because it is something different". But that does not make it good, I am sorry. If I watch something and nothing changes just because it is supposed to shock you with an ending that you know from old horror movies and because not all endings need to be happy and that one thing was just better, then these reasons alone do not actually convince me. Instead of forcing it to be a part of the flow you can totally feel how it is forced to be against it. I do not like all of that, especially not when it happens for such reasons.

I am giving this movie a "4" to actually be generous - as disappointed as I am the movie would be rated less.

The review contains spoilers and is also rated based on a very subjective way. It not being a thing for me might differ completely from your way of thinking.

Life starts out solid. It is not the classic "2+ hour" movie but gets to the point really quick. The first trailer I have seen of it summed it up pretty much anyway. The story is very classic. An alien lifeform is found, humanity underestimates it for more than 5 seconds and pays for it. Okay - if it works, it works. The atmosphere and emotional scenes that are supposed to really get you succeed in doing their job, though the movie really forces itself to live only of this for the very reason of telling just another "movie because not all movies can end good". The acting was okay, the alien's last form was designed well and not too traditional, though also not anything that we have not at least seen somewhere before - after all scary looking aliens with tentacles are pretty much a given if we do not talk about Xenomorphs.

And that is exactly the thing here. My personal opinion is that the finale of a movie is the most important part of it. If it is bad, pretty much everything else before could have been good, it does not matter. Ultimately broken down I will not like it. That does not mean it cannot have a "bad ending" as in "all people die" but it just should not have an ending like "it was all for nothing". Let's say for an example everyone dies at the end but some ray of hope was won of it then it can still be okay for me - that is just one example, of course. And this movie just did not have anything of it. The finale of the movie tried to play a little mind game with you so at least the alien would be gotten rid of an all. But no, of course it was not. Everything was implied to get even worse. This was a solid movie setup that ruined everything in the last 2 minutes just because it wanted to stick with its whole tone instead of giving at least a slight bit of a good ending. And this in my opinion is a real waste.