Ironically titled 'Life' is a second-rate space thriller

Rating: 4/10 (9 July 2017)

Daniel Espinosa's space thriller/horror effort 'Life' aims high on the creativity meter, as the film tries to recreate success achieved by a select few other films in the genre. Despite the intentions, the end result is a second-rate procedural thriller set in space that is closer to 'Apollo 18' than 'Alien' on the spectrum.
'Life' starts out fairly innocuously, with a global six-person crew manning the International Space Station (ISS) on a mission to collect a sample collected from Mars in the hopes of finding some signs of living organisms. As expected, the crew finds a small single-celled organism (innocently named "Calvin" by students back on Earth) that ends up growing to a point where...well...it becomes more of a liability than an accomplishment. From here, we witness the cat-and-mouse chase that takes place on (and around) the ISS as the crew tries to prevent further damage from the discovery.
On paper, 'Life' should benefit from the A-list cast, which includes Ryan Reynolds as a "guns blazing" American cowboy type, Jake Gyllenhaal as a more pragmatic, intellectual astronaut, Idris Elba as a dedicated scientist, Rebecca Ferguson as a CDC rep and Hiroyuki Sanada and Olga Dihovichnaya as experienced pilots. However, the script does not allow these actors to excel for various reasons, whether there are "early exits" or the dialogue they're forced to recite is underwhelming. It's fair to say Ferguson does the best job with the hand she's dealt, but even so, it's not a memorable performance.
But it's not just the script or the cast's fault. There are so many resemblances to other more superior films - whether 'Alien' or more recently, 'Gravity' - that 'Life' does not come off as all that original. While the special effects are good, they're about what you'd expect, and while there are interesting themes explored, including the purpose of life, the scenes that feature these feel like they were inserted jut to keep the film from feeling too much like a traditional "murder by the numbers" horror movie. Finally, the "saw this coming" finale does not do anything to help the film's cause.
'Life' should have more accurately been called 'Death,' but that probably wouldn't have resonated with moviegoers quite as much.