Life
It’s probably an homage, but the whole plot is like Salt, a script unearthed from the 1950’s filmed straight. A Scary Dogmatic Alien (the dogma is communism), played straight? Like a philosophical Alien, devoid of all the subtext that made it great. Cool effects though.
Too bad after first act said alien assumes a humanoid form with a mouth. Turns into a bog standard horror film, with more capable Alien than a mere xenomorph. Not only it’s strong enough to maim or kill grown adults, it learns orbital mechanics in a few hours, avoiding being blasted off into space on the second life raft. Eat your heart out, Carl Friedrich Gauss!
The creature escapes to Earth and can easily spread like COVID from some unnamed Southeast Asian country to all corners of the earth.
The first part of this made me think this featured a truly alien alien! I started thinking about Solyaris and everything. Ends up a competent middle-of-the-road effort.
This predates Gravity by a lot, but it’s not so different. It also predates Prometheus, the scientists are clearly more smart here. They still die gruesome deaths anyway, all of them. ALL OF THEM.
At least the cast doesn’t let this turn into absolute lethargy or active hatred. One of the fastest ways to do this is having Ryan Reynolds playing his regular persona and having him maimed and killed in the most gruesome way possible. This is what catharsis is all about.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.