Life (2017)

This is the movie about the folks on the International Space Station recovering the probe from Mars and finding evidence of, well, life. Life which proves to be highly adaptable and really dangerous. Had to laugh at the part where it's still in a petri dish, and the one biologist is waving his finger above it and commenting its curiosity outweighs its fear. Given the audience has a good idea how this is going to end, I assume we're meant to be thinking, "Right back atcha, buddy."

Also, they named the thing Calvin. How sweet, they think I'm a potential threat to all life on the planet. 

Of course the alien breaks containment, and then it's a scramble to try and kill it before it kills them. Although this is a zero-g environment, all the scrambling around tight corridors and trying to improvise solutions reminded me of Alien. They even have crappy, ineffective flamethower things! The point where the thing is outside the station, trying to climb back in through the thrusters, and they keep trying to use the thrusters to kill it, degrading their orbit, made me think of Deep Blue Sea.

I know the movie lampshades that every cell in the creature is somehow simultaneously a muscle cell, a photoreceptive cell, and a nerve cell, meaning it can be, 'all brain', but I was still unsure the thing could be as smart as it's portrayed.

The thing I thought about most during the film was that I've read somewhere that Jack Kirby thought it was a really bad idea to include that gold plate on the Voyager spacecraft detailing how to find our planet. He figured if an alien species could find us, it probably wouldn't end well for humanity. My feeling is, given how big space really is, if aliens get close enough to our Solar System to encounter Voyager, they're already likely to find us. If they have to wait for it to reach their star system, humanity is probably long extinct before they'll ever get anywhere close to us.

But the notion we really have no idea what we'll be dealing with if we do encounter intelligent life (or even life, period) from another world, and that it can very easily go badly in a hurry, that I can follow. We only have life on our own world to judge by, and we have no idea if our conditions or metabolic cycles or whatever are commonplace or an aberration.

There were a few different ways I thought the end could go. I was still hoping for a relatively happy one, eternal optimist (read: sucker) that I am, but there were at least twice as many ways I could see it ending badly, so I wasn't really surprised. And I'd seen a review of the movie at some point after it came out, so I also wasn't surprised when one of the big-name actors died early. Knowing didn't ruin the movie since it's really a horror flick. Audience goes in primed expecting most of them to die.