Uncomfortable to watch -yet you have to know what happens...

Rating: Null/10 (21 April 2019)

I only took interest to watch this because Jake Gyllenhaal was in it. Then I found all the characters not fleshed out enough to be interesting or to be cared about. Dull or two-dimensional characters help sink any movie. And the more I read the reviews here after watching, the more I discovered how utterly stupid most of the story's events and details are. But while watching the film, it had a lot of suspense and building tension and dread to keep me awake and riveted, sort of the way you can't look away from a car crash out of morbid curiosity. In the end, I felt depressed and morose after watching it. I particularly hated the scenes with the lone, poor little rat tethered in place with some sick kind of lab experiment harness, just knowing something horrible was going to happen to it. It's even worse when that kind of thing really upsets me in real life, animal experimentation, and I am vehemently opposed to it. So the filmmakers exploited that kind of knowledge, knowing that nobody wants to see anything bad happen to a sweet little rat with cute whiskers, and they kept showing closeups of him or her, just to keep everyone who would care utterly uncomfortable and squeamish. It worked, but just fed in me a growing feeling of unease and dread that of course wasn't appeased or dissipated by the increasingly bleak events of the film. Would I watch this again? I don't know, maybe, but only because I did like Calvin, even if he did look somewhat like a space squid. The fact that he becomes a relentless predator, one almost with a seemingly conscious agenda to kill those first who harmed it and in terrible ways....gotta admit, he never could be as good as the aliens in Aliens, but, not bad for a space baddie creature either. Especially considering I still can't figure out if it even has eyes or a face.