Life

It's life, Jim, but actually as we know it. Life is an average sci-fi picture, one that gets by on effects and general sci-fi values. Plot is utterly familiar. OK! It's always going to be unfair to judge a film of this type by the bar raiser that was Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), but really the familiarity on show here is tantamount to being naughty. A group of space explorers discover an alien life form and after the initial wonderment and excitement subsides, things quickly turn bad, with the potential for threat to mankind as we know it... That's pretty much it, really, the cast go through the motions of being in a play that is basically the characters being picked off by an alien manta ray thingy. Standard formula takes a grip of the viewer, who will be killed? who is next? will anyone survive? and etc. The makers - just to continue the unadventurous theme - throw in a Deep Blue Sea moment, while Hiroyuki Sanada has wandered in off of Sunshine's Icarrus II to feature aboard the International Space Station. The ending has and will infuriate many, but personally I liked it, very much from The Twilight Zone dimension, to which it lifts the piece just above averageville. Not recommended with any conviction, especially to sci-fi fans stung by serious science defects and logic holes, while casual sci-fiers would be better off with the brilliance of Alien or something more fun packed and unpretentious like Leviathan (1989). But as it is it's a decent enough time waster. 6/10