put this one on the meh pile

Rating: 5/10 (8 March 2019)

A silly movie with bland, boring characters. Being a big fan of the ISS, and what it represents as an achievement of humanity, the visuals of this movie were nice to watch. Effects wise, everything was perfect. However, the plot was just somewhat formulaic of the same old genre, i.e. space alien is busy eating everyone in a remote location, one by one. Think of "The thing" or "the blob" or "alien" but on the international space station instead. However, what made those movies memorable was that eventually, the protagonists, being human beings who want to survive and not be eaten by a space alien, managed to outsmart said alien creature and eventually contain or subdue it somehow. Ripley managed to kill the alien, they managed to freeze the blob and drop it in the arctic, and the Thing I think never did complete its return spacecraft before it was dispatched.
In this movie though, the alien creature is already contained. They know its there, they give it food, nourishment and play with it like its their favourite pokemon, not for one moment questioning why it might be that everything else on Mars is dead, and this thing is all that is left. Obviously, one by one, it eats them and they run around the ISS (an environment which all these experts are no doubt super familiar with), like a bunch of headless chickens, concocting one half baked plan after another. Turns out though, that this creature has some of the thickest plot armour in cinematic history. There's no blasting it out an airlock for this one. It's just going to get all the way to Earth with the assistance of the most incompetent space crew in the history of cinema. This life form is based on carbon and oxygen, and needs water, just like humans, but unlike humans, it can survive the freezing and oxygenless vacuum of space, can survive fire, electrocution, and can hop about with surprising agility. Despite this creatures amazing survivability, and the fact that it gets more intelligent as it gets bigger, it somehow managed to leave no trace of its existence on Mars, save for a few convenient small cells in some dirt.
Every technological cliche and mishap happens, one after another. Crew members repeatedly try to rescue fellow crew members, despite knowing they are obviously already dead.
Everything about this movie was daft. I didn't find the space alien scary, because the crew were total idiots. They all deserved to die, and the ending left me saying a great big MEH, DON'T CARE.