Vida

I'm seeing a few negative reviews for this one that I don't understand. Life isn't a cinematic masterpiece exactly, but it's thrilling enough to hold your attention for one hundred minutes.

The story is simple: something horrible gets on a space ship and wants to waste the crew. We don't know much about it or how it thinks except that it's extremely hostile and needs oxygen. After the very well-paced and beautifully-executed set-up the remainder of the film consists of the humans trying to outwit and destroy this thing.

And that's it. It doesn't get boring. It does the job. It has a couple of pointless moments we don't really need amidst the exciting chaos, and then it rumbles to a slightly weak finish.

You don't except a mind-shattering gourmet meal when you order a cheeseburger and shouldn't get bent out of shape when this isn't Alien or 2001. It's a very solid film. Switch brain off and give a go if you like space stuff.

No much else to say.

Life was a solid horror/alien movie with a wonderful cast and well shot visuals. It is not a masterpiece especially considering the genre's many great entries, including the alien which seemed to be something that this film has modelled after.

I liked how this film in contrast to Alien seemed very plausible and realistic, focusing on the 'science' part of sci-fi. The mission in search of extra terrestrial living organisms is a very interesting topic and this film made the possibilities of this seem so much more plausible. At the same time Life also brings up an interesting idea of how little we know about the universe that we live in and how inexperienced we are. How alien life form could be so different to our expectations and hence the debate of whether we should explore and the consequences of human curiosity.

It carried a good amount of intensity and suspense and was gory and terrifying at times.The performances were quite good, the cast is pretty great though so there was no surprise there but it did fall flat in writing though, not that it was poor but it's a very straight forwards and rather clichéd trope that we've seen many times even though it was indeed well done.

I wasn't expecting much from this movie because of the reviews that I've read. But it turned out pretty good. Not a great movie but it's pretty interesting. Some of the intense parts actually had me at the edge of my seat.

It starts of interesting and moody, then it's suspenseful but 20 minutes in it turns stupid and stays that way till the end. The characters make one stupid decision after another and that takes you out of the movie. After the third stupid decision/action you lose interest. Good actors, great sets, good SFX, crappy script. It's entertaining, but just barely.

I enjoyed this movie. It has some great jumpy moments at the beginning to pull you into this movie's orbital trajectory.

But to enjoy this movie you do have to suspend your essential disbelief that America and a consortium of other product placement regions, sorry I mean Russia, China and Japan, could spend "well over $200bn" putting a science station in orbit and then man it (or should that be "woman it") with half of a dozen of their most stupid scientists (convincingly played by Jake Gyllenhaal, Ryan Reynolds and Rebecca Ferguson). ;-)

If you can do that, you'll love it and even find some of it funny.

And if you've never seen Alien (1979) or Gravity (2013) before you might even find the plot line highly original too. ;-)