Inspired by Alien, succeeds on all but the most important one!

Rating: 6/10 (23 March 2017)

First let's get one thing straight, I love these kind of movies. Alien has been one of my favorite movies since I first saw it.
Life clearly got it's inspiration from it. You can't deny it. And seeing as Alien was it's inspiration, you'll wan't to compare it to it.
But if you do that, like I did, you will not have a good time and will think it's not a great movie.
The story of Life is simple in its design. A probe comes back to the ISS with soil samples from Mars. In it the team finds a single celled life-form which they are able to revive from it's dormant state. They start testing and things go wrong and the whole movie goes on a decent into a roller-coaster of tension.
In the tension department this movie truly excels, it has a few good jump scares, a few brutally gore filled sequences. But that's all there is.
Comparing it to Alien, which is similar, it does almost just as well. Don't get me wrong, the design for the life-form is great. Unique to be exact.
But why is this not going to be a classic or overall great horror- SF like Alien? It has all the same base elements as it's older brother. And the answer to this is fairly easy. The tension in Life compared to Alien is stale. Alien started out a lot slower, giving you a false sense of security. When the action starts, you just can't seem to think of any means of escape or survival. And Alien tops it off with a different kind of tension than Life.
Where Life has a tension built on the idea of the life-form itself, the tension in Alien is not because of the alien, but because of the surroundings. Giving you a claustrophobic feeling preying on the primal instinct of fight or flight. Life doesn't even consider this. The setting of ISS should have given you the feeling that there is no escape. But you never get that idea. Because of this small, but key, difference, it makes itself inferior to its own inspiration.
One other difference between the two is not it's cast, but it's crew. The crew in Life seem to always make the wrong decision. Although I love it when a good plan fails over and over again, that was not the case in this movie. Most of the decisions seemed like they would not have been made by professional scientist and astronauts. These people should have been trained to deal with any situation, even a breach in quarantine. But apparently they never trained for any of these situations. In Alien the crew were just work-class civilians who just happened to stumble upon something extra-terrestrial. They were people like you and me. This made all their decisions the same as we would make them, improving on the dread and hopelessness of the situation.
All in all, it's still a fun movie to watch. It has a great cast, a great creature design and a magnificent plot twist at the end, but don't go in thinking this could be the next Alien because you will leave disappointed.