Life (2017)

Life (or stylized as L I F E ) is a 2017 American Sci-fi horror film directed by Daniel Espinosa, written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick and starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, and Ryan Reynolds. It premiered at South by Southwest on March 18, 2017 and released in cinemas on March 24, 2017.

Plot
In the near future, astronauts (Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, Ryan Reynolds) aboard the International Space Station are on the cutting edge of one of the most important discoveries in human history: the first evidence of extraterrestrial life on Mars. As members of the crew conduct their research, the rapidly evolving life-form proves far more intelligent and terrifying than anyone could have imagined.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) The main problem with the movie is that like rest of Alien rip-off, this movie is very unoriginal story and overly similar to Sci-Fi films like mh:greatestmovies:Alien, and mh:greatestmovies:Gravity, In addition, it's also overly similar to Alien: Covenant, which was released two months before Covenant was released. What's more, the movie ends up being Alien meets Gravity, which is horrible at sounds due to a ludicrous plotline with underdeveloped characters and subplots that absolutely goes nowhere at all.
 * 2) The creature also rip-off Alien creatures, facehuggers.
 * 3) David and most of the characters are pretty unlikeable in this film, and rarely get any character development because of it.
 * 4) The film is boring, as it almost lacks the scares, is almost nothing is scary at all.
 * 5) It still got criticized by many over scientific inaccuracies.
 * 6) The title even ripped off the Alien title, because the fact the title was with spacing the letters like Alien did.
 * 7) It feels like it was written by someone who saw too many sci-fi space movies.
 * 8) The ending is just abysmal, leaving nothing but a sequel bait. To put it briefly, the two space pods were separate, and ripped off the clips from Gravity, and David's pod splashed down into Vietnam seas (the location was Ha Long Bay), And what happens next? When the Vietnamese discovered David, which he is now restrained by Calvin, Miranda's pod's navigation system fails due to damage sustained from the debris, sending her flying away from Earth out of control, much to her horror, despite David's attempts to warn them, the fishermen open the pod's hatch, as more boats arrive on the scene, in fact, it would have been a sequel baiting.

Good Qualities

 * 1) The acting is decent, but this didn't save the movie.
 * 2) The screenplay is good.
 * 3) Much like mh:greatestmovies:Gravity, the movie has beautiful visual effects and extremely realistic and convincing, as it was all converted into 3D. Overall, it's CGI and 3D done right.
 * 4) Wonderful soundtrack by Jon Ekstrand.

Reception
Life received mixed-to-positive reviews from critics, as well as mostly negative reviews from the audience (despite also receiving positive reviews), with praise for its acting, visuals, and screenplay, but some criticized for its lack of originality. On review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 67% based on 237 reviews, with an average rating of 6/10, as well as 54% score for audiences. The site's critical consensus reads, "Life is just thrilling, well-acted, and capably filmed enough to overcome an overall inability to add new wrinkles to the trapped-in-space genre.". On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 54 out of 100, based on reviews from 44 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". The film earned a user score of 6.4/10, indicating "generally favourable reviews." On IMDb and Letterboxd, the film earned the score of 6.6/10 and 3/5.

Chris Stuckmann gave this movie a B+. Angry Joe earned this movie a rating of 7/10.

Box office
Life became a box office hit, grossed $100.5 million worldwide against a $62 million budget.

Videos
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Trivia

 * This was Columbia Pictures' first film to be produced by Skydance Media, after the deal with Paramount Pictures was not confirmed, despite circling to handle the distribution rights to the film.
 * Composer Jon Ekstrand wrote his sixth score while working with Espinosa. Ekstrand aimed to create an "atonal-horror score with some melodic elements", mostly focused on orchestral music while opening with "more melodic and classical cinematic" tones to not give away the horror trappings early on. Espinosa specifically told Ekstrand to seek a sound reminiscent of Bernard Herrmann, with some influence from György Ligeti to reference the music from mh:greatestmovies:2001: A Space Odyssey.
 * In March 2017, it was noted that stock footage of a crowd reacting to Spider-Man catching Gwen Stacy from mh:greatestmovies:Spider-Man 3's B-roll was used in a red brand trailer for Life. This announcement led to theories that Life was secretly an origin story for the symbiote featured in Spider-Man 3, a theory made more popular by the announcement of a Venom film for 2018 the day after the story broke, and that Life's screenwriters, Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, had previously written a Venom script. When asked about the rumour in a Collider interview, Daniel Espinosa confirmed that he was a fan of Venom. Jake Gyllenhaal would later portray the villain Mysterio in the 2019 Marvel Cinematic Universe film mh:greatestmovies:Spider-Man: Far From Home, while Daniel Espinosa would later directed Morbius in 2022.