Not-so-precious life (the movie)

If you've seen the trailers to LIFE, it looks pretty awesome: a near-future spacelab thing where they reanimate a cell from Mars--and it turns around and bites them. 

From there, the movie could have gone into an exploration of how to communicate with the alien, or how to defeat it, or a meditation about the inherent violence of life... instead, it (spoilers, but not recommending you hold your breath for this one anyway) devolved into an Alien remake, except this time the people trapped on the ship with the murderous alien don't have any good ways to fight it. From promising beginnings, LIFE basically becomes a horror-thriller about people trapped in a house with a killer loose, and doesn't end up stimulating much gray matter other than lizard brain fight-or-flight . 

On a scale of one to awesome, this is an okay: nice production value, truly scary at moments, but ultimately no well-developed characters or surprising storylines. Even their final solution to the monster sort of comes from thin air--and don't get me started on the ending. It's not quite alien-bursting-from-dead-character's-stomach, but it's almost as bad. 

Watch at your own risk. It has some cheap thrills, but I'm thinking your life-hours might be too precious to spend on LIFE. 

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