source: IMDb

What a waste of talent! A potentially great sci-fi alien film turned into a stupid grown-up scientists “slasher” film in space camp. Sure, in piecemeal there were some great scenes and there with enough tension to be on edge, sometimes, but there were far more head-scratching moments that you wanted to scream…Don’t do that, RUN!

One saving grace the film was short: 1hr 44mins, so it got into actions quickly, imagine there wasn’t time even for a pow-wow with the six-doctor crew to discuss how to kill the damn thing.

In an international space station, the crew is able to retrieve a space capsule that contains soil sample from Mars. The mission is obviously to discover any form of life, and sure enough a single cell organism turns into a being with leaf-like appendages, like a star-fish, but thinner and transparent. On earth, people are excited to know that life exists in outer-space, and even named the creature: Calvin.

A disabled biologist, Dr. Hugh(Ariyon Bakare), treats Calvin as the biggest discovery; one that will have enormous contributions to human. (ding ding) why Dr. Hugh thinks it will behave? let alone that it might have miraculous power. Hugh is victim number 1. Victim 2, Dr. Rory(Ryan Reynolds), is an American cowboy that becomes so irate he keeps blasting Calvin with a torch trying to kill him. (ding ding) A guy, a minute ago, said that the lab be contained to avoid contamination, yet he opens the hatch and pulls Hugh out…then Calvin grabbed him. Instead of getting the f*&k out, he wants to kill Calvin: heroic American? Since I said this was a slasher film, you just need to see who is next, and what one stupid thing they did to get them kill. Apparently this thing, Calvin, was better adaptive than the Xenomorph, i.e., even blasting it out of the airlock into space would not kill it, and because it was all brain(each cell is a complete being) it will figure out how to get back in again. Was it too clever, or humans were dumb?

Great actors and performances but wasted in a weak story. I bet there were problems, that’s why we got a pared-down film (should be 120 mins with today’s norm.)

So there were surprises, the kind that were predictable: two life-pods, one with Dr. David(Jake Gyllenhaal)and the other has Dr. Miranda(Rebecca Ferguson); the final mission is one pod enters the deep space with Calvin onboard, and one to earth…

What can I say? Life sucks and pun intended.