Sort of Alien meets Gravity meets Predator: Death at the Hands of Calvin the Terrible

Rating: 4/10 (7 May 2018)

I guess if there's a message to this film, it's life is typically hostile, so you should be on your guard. Not exactly an uplifting message. A team of scientists in an orbiting space station extract a bit of Martian soil and in it is a one-cell creature. The first few minutes of the film are relatively interesting. The one-cell creature seems to respond rather benignly to Dr. Hugh Derry (Ariyon Bakare) to his gloved hands which he has put into the chamber where resides "Calvin". Then Calvin appears to go into extensive hibernation which makes Dr. Derry bored and frustrated. Of course, he decided to "wake up" Calvin with electric stimuli. Turns out this was a very bad idea.
The creature not only responds but turns into a kind of flying organism with the shape of a star fish and the lethalness of 1000 jelly fish. From here on out, the story goes from bad to horridly unbearable. Calvin makes Alien (from the 1979 film) seem like a wimpy creature. Ripley and company had it much easier dealing with the Alien. Calvin is super-fast, seems to withstand anything, including large doses of the equivalent of rocket launch propulsion stuff. All the while, the thing consumes people, a rat in captivity (which is never explained) and grows bigger and bigger.
I think the main problem I had with this film was the notion that the creature was absolutely invulnerable. They do everything except nuke it and nothing slows it down. I think I would have liked the crew to figure out better about what made it tick. Even a dragon for all its grandeur has a vulnerable spot. Calvin is like a sting-ray on steroids which seems to be immortal. It's like the screenwriters just opted for a copout by having the alien creature indestructible, invulnerable, and faster than a speeding Superman.
Also, The characters were a bit flat, except for the scientist, who wants to explore the thing like he's a daredevil willing to try anything to find out more about the creature, Dr. David Jordan (Jake Gyllenhaal), the pilot who likes floating around in space more than dealing all the horrible people on Earth, and Dr. Miranda North (Rebecca Ferguson) who seems to have more emotion than anyone of the crew put together save maybe the scientist. Jordan starts to show more emotion as the film progresses. The other crew members were quite unmemorable, unlike the crew of the Nostromo from Alien where each character was quirky and not necessarily likeable.
A rather disappointing film. It's really just Alien again, except it's a slimy semi-transparent creature with about as much humanity as Attila the Hun. I think the creature needed something a bit more redeeming rather than just a slimy brute who relentlessly goes after its human victims. He should have been called "Calvin the Terrible".