‘Life’ Is Entertaining While Woefully Unoriginal

Each year Hollywood fills the empty space of weekend Box Offices with fillers of the uninspired, formulaic variety; movies so familiar you seem to recognize them at once as something you have seen before, here the same yet seemingly different, a black cat crossing your path and then crossing it again as the Matrix shows the hand of its glitch. This weekend, that movie takes the form of Life, a sci-fi drama that succeeds in capturing the long-prescribed design for survival flicks and thus accordingly succeeds at contrived, unimaginative drama as well. Whether you watch Life or not, you have seen Life before.

The plot follows a diverse group of 6 astronauts in a space station that finds itself host to a microscopic organism, the first indisputable evidence of life outside Earth. Each astronaut brings a specialty to the crew, from mechanics to piloting to biology to firewalls and containment, making each of them indispensable to an element of their mission. If the last specialization seems odd to you – a firewall and containment expert –it is essential to accept for certain plot elements to make sense as intended, like many parts of the movie where you are better off suspending disbelief and trusting the explanation given by the film without questioning logic or alternatives. If that microscopic organism inexplicably knows how to navigate a spaceship and pilot an aircraft, you are better off to not question why. The microscopic villain is named Calvin and grows in a Pokémon-lik…