LIFE

(2017) Half a dozen astronauts/scientists, aboard an international space station on a mission to retrieve samples from Mars that may denote life on the planet, luck out by finding a tiny single-cell organism that eventually does - indeed - prove irrevocably that life beyond Earth exists, in director Daniel Espinosa's visually stunning but ultimately soulless take on an updated Alien.  Needless to say, the tiny organism - named "Calvin" - doesn't stay tiny for long, and soon the quality cast (including Ryan Reynolds, basically playing Ryan Reynolds, along with Jake Gyllenhaal, Hiroyuki Sanada, and Rebecca Ferguson, to name a few) find themselves peeping around every corner, into every air duct, and doing a lot of running for doors that will hermetically seal them off from the ever-growing, increasingly pissed off (and intelligent) Calvin.  Unable to not compare this film to Ridley Scott's masterpiece, the one glaringly obvious thing Alien had going for it that's lacking in Life is a sense of caring for the characters and what happens to them.  In Alien we cared the snot about Dallas and Ripley and company, and what happened to them; here, you don't really get a sense of who these people are outside of the space station, and any emotional attachment to the film's characters suffers a bit from it.  Life has its moments, and is worth seeing if you're into the whole alien-vs-man/woman genre.  Also, Calvin is kind of cool.  And then there's that ending - which I actually liked, although I fear many seeing the film might not. (rated R)  7/10 stars