And Exactly As We Know It

Conditions: Colder and colder.

Film Review: Life.

It's kind of funny how many people see a trailer and start filling in too many of the blanks.  The trailer for Life showed a fairly straight forward alien monster film, but it seems like a lot of people thought there was going to be a lot more to it.  I dunno.  Maybe some long drawn out philosophical musings over the nature of mankind or something.  But Life is a lot more simpler than that, it's a creature feature, in spaaaaace.

We're off to a quick start, the characters are introduced on the International Space Station, right in the middle of a crisis with a Mars probe on its way back to Earth, but knocked off course, of course.  At the last second the team is able to catch this thing, then a quick montage shows them extracting some Mars goop and growing it in a petri dish.  The team has been assembled from all the major landmasses, for all the major markets, covering all the major scientific roles.  But unfortunately there's a little bit of the Prometheus-lite dumb smart people thing going on here.  The start growing a thing, and it grows and grows, and grows some more.  The people of Earth decide to call it Calvin, but for the life of me I can't figure what the end game here is.  Bring it to Earth?  Leave it on the moon?  Elect it president?  Seriously, what's the plan here?

Oops, no time for that.  Some plot contrivance causes Calvin to go into a bit of a coma, so the scientists, as impatient as your standard audience-goer, decide to shock him with a tiny cattle prod.  You can pretty much imagine how that goes.  Now blood is spurting, people are dying, sad music is playing, and the poor old space station is getting smashed up.  It's just a process of elimination.  There is a twist ending, it's a twist ending in the same way a British pickpocket will stab you in the back for your watch.  It's nasty, which kind of sits with the rest of the film: stupid smart people doing mostly dumb things with no overall plan in sight, who get what's coming to them.  It's fun.  Two unused plasma cutters out of five.

- Peace out