Director - Daniel Espinosa
Cast - Ryan Reynolds, Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, Hiroyuki Sanada, Olga Dihovichnaya, Ariyon Bakare
Genre - Sci-fi
Streaming On - Netflix
"It's just surviving. Life's very existence requires destruction. Calvin doesn't hate us. But he has to kill us in order to survive."
Life is a 2017 American sci-fi film directed by Daniel Espinosa, with a star studded cast consisting of Ryan Reynolds, Jake Gyllenhaal and Rebecca Ferguson. The movie follows a six-member crew of the International Space Station. The astronauts discover the first evidence of extra-terrestrial life on Mars, they begin realising that the life form is extremely intelligent and hostile.
Life is one of those films, which is made with a script that has been used like a hundred times before, it has a star studded cast which it puts to no use! Jake Glynehaal is just loitlering around in the film in the starting and only gains importance in the last thirty minutes. While Ryan Reynolds` role was pretty good, with him delivering perfect one liners with his amazing comic timing, but it was short lived. While all other actors did justice to their respective roles, none of the actors really shined in their roles. The movie is filled with loopholes and some are so obvious that it really makes you wonder if any real effort has been made to make the script better. While the gripping music and the human-alien chase sequences are thrilling and gripping, but there isn`t anything new to it. Life fails to provide anything that we haven`t seen before.
Even though the star power was wasted and the script wasn`t so strong, it still has a lot of plus points! The movie is a directors` paradise! The camera work is amazing, the cinematography is pretty good too and the movie shows the space station in a near perfect manner. Showcasing the zero gravity in such an ideal way, the effects really do overpower the poor script. The best part about the movie is the alien! The alien aka Calvin is probably the most unique extraterrestrial species shown on the big screen. The CGI and the exceptional direction is the saviour of this film.
JRating: 7/10
JRev: Part Alien, part Gravity, just not as good as either of them.
