Review: LIFE

Life and Death On An International Space Station

2.5 stars

Mini Review:

As you heard when you watched Beauty And The Beast: Tale as old as time… This tale of an alien life in a spacecraft. You’ve seen it all before: the alien life form, the crew of the spacecraft, one crazy scientist, and last but not the least: how no one can hear you scream in space…

Main Review:

The wait for the sequel to the original series Alien has been long time coming to the big screen. The fans of space horror stories were getting restless. Life is an interesting scheduled stop, methinks. And quite satisfying too, even though wholly predictable.

As you know in any movie where men battle giant villains: whether it is Kong or Godzilla or Alien, the people in teams going into the dark jungle or space either are collateral damage: which means you don’t even know their backstories. The beast just smashes them and they just go: aaaaaaaaaaaghhhhh! Or the people have back stories (soldier returning home to a dream of his life - the farm in case of the gladiator, or a new born child whose picture he carries on his iPad and so on. Or a soldier who hates everything: the heat, the mosquitoes, other critters will surely die at the hand of a gigantic critter or thousands of the critters) and you know they will be the first to die. And die horrible deaths.

In Life too, the spacecraft is full of scientist types and flight type men and women, and even though we are given fleeting introductions, there is nothing that is beguiling enough to keep us glued to the fate of the characters.

Yes, there’s an alien life form that arrives with the soil samples, and it grows. But if I were lying quietly, let’s say in hibernation, and you decided to zap me with an electrical charge, I would get my fangs out and snap at you, no? Squeeze the life force out of your zappy fingers, break those fingers and go claw my way into you mouth and eat you from the inside, no? And I would look for your friends, find your friends and kill them too, one by one. I would be Liam Neeson of the alien life form world.

And if I, life form from the alien world turn out to be Liam Neeson, then I would use every trick in the science fiction films trope collection that would help me survive in the International Space Station…

You watch and you watch and you watch with your heart in your mouth and realise that you may be, just may be rooting for the life form.

P.S. Although you do see the end come at you as fast as a decaying orbit, you enjoy the film quite thoroughly.