A good movie, shame it had all been done before

Rating: 6/10 (2 August 2017)

"Life" is an American, (mostly) English-language film from 2017, so really new. It is perhaps the most known work by Swedish director Daniel Espinosa. The writers are Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick and they are the ones who were in charge of the script for the recently very successful superhero film Deadpool, so it is no surprise Ryan Reynolds is also on board here again, especially as he already worked with Espinosa before too. Their new work here runs for roughly 100 minutes and takes us on board of the ISS when a new life form on planet Mars is discovered. The film is set a bit in the future as we hear there's 8 billion people living on Planet Earth at that point. Apart from Reynolds, Oscar nominee Jake Gyllenhall is the star here, but Rebecca Ferguson, Hiroyuki Sanada and Ariyon Bakare are known as well. You could really say they got a diverse cast here as the film got White Caucasians, African-Americans, Asians, Russians... Fits in nicely with recent criticism in Hollywood (or not because Asians and Russians weren't complaining). But that's another story. Back to the movie now.
My reference in the title refers to the 1979 Ridley Scott movie "Alien". This one we have here reminded me so much of that classic and I am positive this is not just because I watched Alien the other day. The title, the growing creature killing one space ship/station member after the next, the female/male proportion up there, the refusal to open airlocks, the way they recognize Earth is not necessarily a friend and they may not want them to return etc. There were at least a dozen other examples in there and you will recognize them when you see them. So yes this is a bit of a modern "Alien" for sure and with all the similarities I refuse to believe that this was coincidence. The two writers must have been clearly inspired by Alien because overall the parallels exist to such an extent that it just cannot be coincidence anymore. This means we do not have the most original movie here, but still a very good one, even if in my opinion it is all too technical early on and needs a while to get going really. But then it is quite impressive, actually closer to ****/***** than to **/*****.
This is obviously not an actors' movie, but it is all about the creature, the horror connected to it and the crew member's fight for survival. And that's absolutely good enough. I enjoyed the watch, especially in the second half of the film. In my opinion, it fits in nicely with the recent wave of space-themed films. It's not as good as "Gravity", but that's really only because of how good that one was, not because this one here was weak or anything. Haven't seen The Martian yet to compare these two. By the way, the ending reminded me a bit of Gravity with the idea of one character drifting into space to save another and the capsule in water scene. I assume that the ending and how it strongly differs from Alien also helps this movie in getting the parallel out of many people's minds. It was a really good plot twist at the end, so a bit of a shame they did not attempt to be original on other occasions really. I give "Life" a thumbs-up overall, definitely worth checking out if you like the genre and/or the cast. Go see it, a definite contender for best sci-fi movie of 2017.