A six man team of astronauts abroad the International Space Station retrieve a sample from Mars that contains a living organism. Nicknamed "Calvin", the new species rapidly accelerating its development and proves to be a dangerous threat to everyone on board and on Earth. The insipidly titled LIFE is general sci-fi fare, offering up no new ideas and no real thrills whatsoever. Nonetheless, it gets the job as a very mildly entertaining B-movie to waste an evening with. The film itself frankly sums itself up with its first major scene: a flashy simulated one-shot that showcases all of the main characters, yet providing no depth, and cumulates with a major space endeavor that you weren't aware was supposed to be suspenseful. The script was written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, two talented individuals who helped shake off the cobwebs from zombie and superhero films with ZOMBIELAND and DEADPOOL but couldn't do the same with their attempt at hard sci-fi. You easily expect the moments when a certain major actor bites it or when the super top secret backup plan is executed. Their answer to providing continuing conflict is to predictably drop the intelligence of the smart scientists at certain key moments and make the villainous creature way too powerful. And then you get to the ending, which does stick some of the landing and is quite cruel but again feels like something an edgy teen would have come up with in their creative writing class. Director Daniel Espinosa offers up a sleek presentation, the acting is pretty good, and the music supplies the basic space operatic notes. The only thing that absolutely sinks the film in any way is the closing credits, which are nearly ten minutes long and stupidly features the most unsurprisingly choice of a pop song in a sci-fi film. That's right, you guessed, it concludes with Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit In The Sky".
FINAL REVIEW: 3 / 5
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