Life

2017 sci-fi horror movie

Rating: 12/20

Plot: People aboard the International Space Station get themselves a new pet. Note: This might be a film adaptation of the children's picture book of Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd's Goodnight Moon.

In my search for movies to watch with my Bad Movie Club people, I come across rip-offs of Alien all the time. I'm not sure I've seen one that had the budget of this Alien clone. As with the others, this lacks the subtleties that make Alien a work of poetic horror minimalist genius.

There are a lot of characters, and the makers of this found actors to play them. They should have just gone with special effects though because there's not much done to flesh out any of them. Sure, they reveal that one of them becomes a father. One of them is brave and sarcastic. One of them waxes poetically about how he prefers being in space over being back home. One of them is a Russian woman named Ekaterina. There's an effort to make the audience care about these people, but the special effects and action sequences overwhelm anything remotely human in the story, and the whole thing just leaves you cold.

One of the Hollywood Ryans is in this. For this movie, it's the Ryan who spends movies yucking it up. Here, whichever Ryan it is yucks it up in space. Jake Gyllenhaal is in there acting all astronaut-y. I don't know who any of these other people are. It doesn't matter because once you know this is an Alien knock-off, you know most of them (or none of them) won't be around to see the closing credits anyway.

I'm not sure what movie magic was used to make the actors and actresses float around like they do in this, but my guess is pixie dust. The opening five minutes or so shows off the ISS and the humans inhabiting it with a continuous shot of them floating around while one of them yucks it up. It's an impressive start, really simulating that weightlessness for the viewer. There are a few nice moments--zero-gravity blood spurts, a jacked-up hand--but this unfortunately starts to get redundant, rerunning the same sort of ideas over and over again with a slightly-larger variations of the undulating monster. The ending would have nearly redeemed it, but the twists created by cheap editing tricks annoyed me more than anything else.

The reading of Goodnight Moon with dramatic music was not a high point.