Calling it a knockoff of Alien is being way too generous. Life is blah.

Rating: 2/10 (9 September 2017)

I was hesitant to watch Life for a few reasons. I remember when it came out, I hardly saw any trailers and it has a strong cast and yet did very poorly. I knew there had to be a reason for that. I'm not sure how a film like this goes so poorly. All parts of it are things we've seen before. Space exploration, vivid personality crew, experts at what they do, find something weird, weird attacks them and picks them off, a few or two or one remaining finds a way to survive. But Life is so completely forgettable. Despite the charisma of the stars in the cast and some very weak attempts at making them seem human, I couldn't care less about any of them. Most of the time I was so bored I didn't care who was in it. Even the music seemed like it was the same little snippet over and over and over again trying to set tone. The special effects are okay although sometimes I thought their faces looked like you could practically see a green screen behind them. It gets marginally better once the practically faceless cast gets picked off but probably only because Jake Gyllenhaal has a lot of chemistry on screen. There is one good solid scene that was still only good because it was reminiscent of Alien. This film checks a ton of boxes for smart sci-fi horror and then doesn't deliver on any of them.
So check out this cast. As mentioned you have Jake Gyllenhaal, Ryan Reynolds, Hiroyuki Sanada and Rebecca Ferguson in your main cast. Between them you might have one okay scene each. Gyllenhaal gets the most but only because he lasts longer than everyone else. It's honestly like watching a cheap slasher flick where people are picked off one by one but not even in a fun gory way. I don't even know what they're goal was behind the film. It's so brutally predictable and obvious with nothing new added to the genre. It feels like a stale remake of a hundred different Alien films and especially THEE Alien film itself.
Director Daniel Espinosa is young and fairly new to Hollywood but he did alright with Safe House though I remember thinking then too that a more experienced director could have done more. He just doesn't seem to know what to do with a strong cast. Life is less than average and I was bored by the half way point. You could compare it to other films but it doesn't try nearly as hard as it should. It was a colossal disappointment with a few and I mean... minimal moments that caused me to look up and keep going instead of turning it off. 2/10