Watch it for what it is!

Rating: 7/10 (12 November 2017)

Life (2017), starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Ryan Reynolds (Starring maybe a stretch, he has less than 40 minutes of screen time) certainly caught my attention. I realize however that it was not so well received from other critics, or movie goers for that matter. It was not a perfect movie, by far, but I do set out to be fair, not rating the movie based on my taste in genre and so forth. For a Sci-Fi thriller in the Alien style, you sort of know what you get, and within the perimeters of this, the movie pulled off what it could and should, very well.
I have read a lot of reviews banging on about how it's a bad prequel to Venom and how it's a bad copy of Alien and so on and so forth. This pains me to read. For one simple reason. Just because Alien deals with an alien coming on-board a spaceship and killing people on board, doesn't mean other movies can't tackle this subject. Remember, we live in a society where all stories has been told. There are only new ways of telling the same story. Taking that into account, I found it very interesting to take the Alien setting and place it so close to earth in a realistic environment. We have the ISS. There are experiments being done on ISS. An alien like Calvin doing irreparable damage does not seem so far fetch anymore. It hits a lot closer to home! Saying a movie is bad because it resembles another movie, is the same as saying a Honda Civic is bad because it has the same parameters as a Toyota Corolla. It doesn't work that way, people!
So with that out of the way. Jake Gyllenhaal definitely carries the movie. Aside from Ryan Reynolds, he's the most interesting character in this movie. Close 2nd is Hiroyuki Sanada, with his character becoming a new father right before everything goes awry. The captain, played by Olga Dykhovichnaya and the "Firewall specialist" played by Rebecca Ferguson are less interesting however. They both seem to have this awkward expositional purpose to everything they say. As if the writers sort of created them in order to convey important information to the audience, that could've been done smarter.
Now, addressing some fellow reviewers who have talked about lack of protocol talking to superiors and the way they work, not being up to normal astronaut standard. Maybe watch the movie and let yourself sink into the universe instead of clamping on to details that are so utterly unimportant? Just because you haven't heard astronaut personal swear on those YouTube livestreams you watch for your "Research and fact resource" doesn't mean it doesn't happen. And people react differently in emergency situations. The world within the movie is set up in a special way, and those are the facts of the movie. That's the point of movies! So instead of scrutinizing something that is well within the boundaries of the movie, enjoy it for what it is instead!
So to summarize. A claustrophobic thriller about an alien lifeforms killing humans. You can't expect the next Oscar Winning, instant classes, instant franchise-able movie. That's not what the movie is about. Watch it for what it is! If you do that, you may very well enjoy it as much as I did. Which, I will urge everybody to do in the future. Watch each single movie for what the movie is, and not for what other movies are or will be. Especially if the movie you are about to watch have nothing to do with, say Shawshank Redemption. Then don't compare the two! I only say it because sadly, I see it done far to often. This movie was enjoyable, but if you want to watch a deeply philosophical piece of movie history, that will make you question your very own existence, well then maybe a Science Fiction Thriller is not the way to go.