Scifi at the movies is weakest where it should be strongest --- in prompting us to stretch our imaginations further

Rating: 3/10 (9 September 2017)

There was nothing wrong with this film technically. There was some great acting, and just about everyone will have told you about the plot twists (more than one). Apart from the usual aspect of 9 channels of noise in (actually silent) space, "Life" does a great job of putting us in a realistic, futuristic extraterrestrial environment. My one complaint --- enough to bump Life from a 4 to a 3-star rating --- is that it has once again decided to portray alien life as evil and scary. Fair enough, it may well turn out to be, and no less a scientist than Mr. Hawking has warned us of that. So my objection is really more than just that --- that for almost as long as there have been science fiction movies, they insist on being (1) dystopian, (2) apocalyptic, (3) quasi-military or (4) horror stories dressed up in science fiction garb. I'm sorry, but back in the golden age of science fiction, the stories were more inclined to be (1) space operas (more recently, The Expanse has got that right) which portray how great human dramas might play out in technologically transformed future worlds; or (2) stories of daily life against a transformed backdrop --- not horror, not utopia, just different (Heinlein excelled at this, though his wonderful stories of daily life and imaginable futuristic adventures never made it to the screen, rather, his least-interesting stories are the only ones ever produced). So, back to the current topic.... Life is, unfortunately, entirely caught up in the current dominant themes in contemporary scifi, and in the end is unable to break free to engage us in the way science fiction ultimately should --- to stir our imaginations by challenging due to visualize the non-obvious implications of technological evolution and change. On that count, despite its many technical and narrative strengths (it is, mostly, a gripping narrative), "Life" falls back to the tried and tested stereotypes, and has, unfortunately, nothing new to add.