Brutally Brilliant

Rating: 8/10 (19 March 2017)

Life tells the story of a crew of astronauts as they discover a new life form on Mars. As the crew begins to examine the new life form, it begins to take each crew member out, one by one. As the life form makes its way through the group, the space team begins to turn on themselves in hopes of survival. The film, directed by Daniel Espinosa, is a heart pounding sci-fi film much in the vein of Ridley Scott's Alien. While many sci-fi films since Alien have been rightly compared to it, Life is a sci-fi film that knows its inspirations and directly alters the perception of its viewers. When you think the film will take a right, it takes a hard, very surprising and very swift left. This keeps you on your toes and never lets you relax at all which is the best compliment I could give this film.
Starring an all star cast of Jake Gyllenhaal, Ryan Reynolds, and Rebecca Ferguson, the film's cast adds to the surprising nature of the story. The moments that end up being the biggest in the film come from the surprising lengths these characters will go in order to survive. This makes for a very layered and very interesting take on something that could have easily been a CGI spectacle with no heart and very little brain. The decisions that these characters make are real decisions. The weight of someone's choice echoes and reverberates throughout the entire film. Espinosa has done a very good job at keeping his characters grounded in reality, much like the film. While this may turn some viewers off, especially those who are expecting something like Gravity or Interstellar, it really made the film something else for me. It was a sci-fi film that was completely unafraid of being real and ho-hum at times.
Overall, Life is an excellent example of going against the typical sci-fi genre tropes and features some truly brilliant performances from the main cast. While many may be expecting something like the sci-fi films that Hollywood has been churning out over the past couple years, this film is far from the normative sci-fi film. This film feels more in line with films like Ridley Scott's Alien and Tarkovsky's Solaris which makes this rise above the rest of the films it will be compared to. Along with being Espinosa's best work, it also features a very human performance from Ryan Reynolds that was just as surprising as the film itself.