Not bad, but nothing groundbreaking

Rating: 5/10 (3 September 2017)

Is this movie groundbreaking? No. Is this movie Oscar worthy? No. is this movie something we haven't ever seen before? No. Then what is it.
Well its a well made hour and 40 minutes of space horror that is not a waste to watch.
Spoilers:
In the beginning I got a bit dizzy, because there is a lot of weightless camera stuff involved...nothing for people with vertigo. But it gets right to the point. Some very important samples from mars are reaching the ISS, and it makes the "catching" of these samples out to be very risky and easy to fail. sadly this is never touched upon again. Any effort to kill off the life within these samples is never met with any objection, whereas the "you don't know what we had to go trough to get this"-character was missing, for better or worse you decide.
For the biologists among us (such as myself), a movie called life could have done a bit better at trying to explain how the creature does what it does. with nothing more than a microscope and some gloves, the on board biologist can tell things that I don't remember being possible in this way from uni. Non scientists might not notice this, but in todays day and age, I enjoy "close" proximity to reality even in Sci-Fi and fantasy. make us believe that what we are seeing can be real!
another problem for me? The alien spends a good....lot of minutes in the vacuum of space(which no adaptation I know of could save an organism that large and exposed, if you are thinking of the tardigrade, they go into a hibernation mode, which this thing (called Kelvin) is said to also do, but never does. What makes this so bad is, that this is a lot of what the movies plot solution rides on: deprive it of oxygen etc and have it go into stupor then send it to deep space. but we have seen it in naked space and nothing happened, so what will "venting the compartments of the ISS" do for you? well at least they stay true to that, because other than being lured to the oxygen sources later on, it doesn't hinder the creature one bit.
there are also three cheat moments in the movie: 1) Now I am no rocket scientists, but if there is a direct path from the thrusters into the crew quarters, you might have a leak in your ship. 2) the alien is in and we have the typical "shadow moves in background, character is uncertain if he saw something" moment. fine, every horror film has that. Then we get some weird "him looking into space" moment, and next his vitals are dropping (actually not next there must at least be like 15 min movie time in-between) and it turns out the monster infested his leg and is slowly eating him (which it could do at record speeds before). How did it get to his leg? its never shown because there is no way that could have happened without us or him seeing it. yes he is a paraplegic, but the monster makes a lot of noise moving around, and is about the size of a medium dog...so stealth is not its strong suit. 3) in the end, the major twist is somewhat predictable, but makes little sense when you sign up the sequences. one shuttle heads to earth, one to space, one gets hit (the earth bound one), and gets back on course, the other gets overwhelmed by the alien. all fine, but the problem is we see the inside of the cabins as all this is happening. and only after the big reveal, do we see that the "into space" shuttle was actually the one without the alien, all of a sudden housing a screaming female survivor. but when we last saw her, she should already have been well on her way into space, yet remained calm, despite her computer that would have informed her about her trajectory. so its a bit a of a cheat to make you think is a happy ending when it isn't.
OK earth is doomed, because despite everyone wanting to burn it, fire never made an impact on this thing. so I guess a sequel will be post apocalyptic.
the acting is solid enough, the effects are OK to more than OK, and you won't feel like a wasting your time if you are just looking for entertainment.