I went and saw Life this past weekend, and it left me quite disappointed. Here are a few brief thoughts I had about this film upon (not so) careful reflection.
WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS.
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What's with that lock-down procedure? I thought the laboratory was supposed to be sealed, but the alien creature managed to escape because they didn't seal it in time? WHY!? And why do they keep calling it a FIREWALL? This alien is not attempting to travel through the internet, so no, you cannot stop it with a FIREWALL.
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How did Deadpool die so easily? He's supposed to have regenerative powers. So, what, Deadpool eats an alien and somehow dies from indigestion? That's lame. And why didn't he break the fourth wall even one time? Did he not realize he was being filmed for this movie!? Shame.
This is where things start to go really bad. Image: Life (2017).
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Communications failure? You'd think the crew would want to maintain contact with mission control at all times—an alien organism breaks free of its cage and goes on a killing spree, and nobody bothers to say "Houston, we have a problem?" The International Space Station has a ham radio, but the crew of this fail-station didn't even try to use one. And is there no other way to solve the communications problem than going outside to play with the antenna? At all? Seriously?
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This alien started off as a single cell, and that cell replicated until it had enough cells to form a large creature. If it's already fractal, why wouldn't it just have made copies of itself and gone after every crew member simultaneously? That could have saved a lot of time. Why make one big thing when you could instead make millions of little things, like pathogens?
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The crew fired the thrusters of the station in an attempt to blast the alien into space. How the heck was this heat sensor thing supposed to work anyways? And how could a few seconds of thruster firing here and there result in such extreme orbital decay? And if there were a risk of de-orbiting the station, why would they even fire the thrusters at all!? And how exactly does an engine nozzle allow an alien to get inside the station!?
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A Soyuz capsule is launched from Earth in an attempt to push the fail-station off into deep space. Why was one man able to open the hatch to the capsule from the outside!? Also, why did Earth send a crew of people to perform such a dangerous task when it could have easily and more safely been automated? How would it have even been possible to push the station that far with such a small rocket booster? And since when did they start putting rockets on permanent launch standby!?
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The Soyuz attempt fails spectacularly. Somehow, despite being sent to push the station into deep space, the mission managed to send the fail-station into a decaying orbit, where it would soon re-enter Earth's atmosphere. Was the Soyuz capsule pushing the wrong way all along? Did they intend to send the station into a lower orbit? This one doesn't make sense at all, even with all the crashing around.
This was a bad idea from the start. Image: Life (2017).
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Why didn't Calvin just hop on board that Soyuz capsule and pilot his little alien ass down to Earth himself? If he's smart enough to disrupt communications, trick the crew into using the station's thrusters, and eventually to pilot himself down to the surface anyways, why couldn't he have just hitched an earlier ride?
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Why did they even bother trying to send the station into deep space? It was already in a stable orbit around Earth, so why even bother messing with it? And why was there no backup in case the Soyuz mission failed? Wouldn't it have been easier to just nuke the fail-station if Earth was that worried about contamination? Plus, had the crew been contaminated at all, they could have easily taken a lifeboat capsule down to the surface anyways, even with the Soyuz boost into deep space. At least a nuke would have entirely destroyed the station, thus solving the contamination problem outright.
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Escape pods. The crew were literally floating for their lives attempting to escape their murderous little alien friend, with one of their crew-members facing a serious medical emergency, and nobody thought of using the escape pods early on? That would have been the first damn thing any sane person would have come up with—there's a murderous alien on board, let's abandon ship before it kills and devours us. Instead, the two surviving crew waited until everyone else had died before attempting their escape.
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Why is this thing called Calvin? And why did they keep calling this murderous alien Calvin? Is it possible that this whole murder-spree started because the alien didn't like being called that!?
