Life - Deadpool and Donnie Darko vs Alien

I’m surprised we don’t have a thread for this.

Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, Ryan Reynolds, Hiroyuki Sanada, Olga Dihovichnaya

Directed by Daniel Espinosa

I’ve seen the trailer so many times I think I’ve already seen the movie, but it’s reviewing okay-ishly enough to hit my threshold for sci-fi, so I’ll probably check it out.

Whoa it has the same captain guy from Sunshine. (Also a sci-fi space movie I happened to recently re-watched. It was funny to see Captain America too).

Cool, another scientist sticking his fingers at alien life forms.

If Get Out was a suspense thriller packaged as a horror movie, then Life is a horror movie disguised as a sci-fi thriller.

Saw it, liked it, it’s entertaining. In the way that I personally felt that seeing the trailers for Get Out didn’t actually spoil the movie too badly I felt the same about the trailers I’d seen from life.

I’ll just add this, and I’ve seen my share of ‘horror porn’ level death. I felt like I was very nearly about to be sick during a death in this movie; it was an amazing experience that I certainly wasn’t looking for but I applaud nonetheless.

When I read this partial sentence I immediately thought of the garbage that is “Event Horizon”. God, I’m still bitter about that. It’s one of the only times I felt like I’d been duped into buying a ticket to go see a movie at a theater.

How long did that take you to realize?

I only ask because I remember really looking forward to it and being excited when I finally sat down in the theater to see it. The previews came and went, and then the opening guitar track started, I remember immediately thinking “I’ve got a bad feeling about this”. I guess it’s true that my expectations were a problem, but I don’t think it would have been possible to better inform me at the tim that “this is not going to be the movie you were hoping for”. “Or good”.

Since a comparison was made to Get Out, I’d say this movie doesn’t suffer from knowing exactly what you’re in for in the way Get Out did.

Life isn’t a must see, but it’s a well executed sci-fi horror flick.

If you saw the trailer and thought you might like it, you probably will, and vice versa.

Ooo, can I play the disguise movie game too?

Sunshine is also a horror movie disguised as a save the world sci-fi movie and Resolution is “horror” movie disguised as a get-my-friend-off drugs drama.

Wait sorry to derail, but what did you think you were getting out of Event Horizon? Was it not fairly upfront about what it was going to be? I have only ever seen this in cable but I really dug it as a slightly higher budget B-movie.

The previews just showed that there was a ship that returned to the solar system after a deep space mission. And they implied something had gone seriously wrong. And it was up to this team to board the ship and find out what happened.

And the preview played excellent Prodigy techno music. I believe they used Prodigy’s Funky Shit for the previews.

So I was going for a serious science fiction movie, and preferably some Prodigy in there as well. (I am still a huge fan of the band). But IIRC, it was neither. I remember sitting there, through the horror supernatural and gore bullshit, bored out of my mind and mad at the trailers. I don’t remember much about the movie beyond that.

That’s fair, I don’t remember the trailer but I must have seen it. I still smile when I think about Laurence Fishburn’s character’s reaction upon discovering the fate of the Event Horizon’s crew:

“We are leaving.”

This trailer?

Nope. That’s much longer, and doesn’t have Prodigy’s Funky Shit in the background of the trailer at any point. (Plus that seems like a trailer that aired in theaters, while I watched trailers on TV mostly at this point, which tend to be either 30 second spots or 60 second ones at most).

For me, I hoped I was getting a good sci-fi/horror movie (I never saw a trailer with Prodigy movie in it; might have saved me the price of the ticket). Something moody and atmospheric. The opening guitar riff set off an alarm bell although I couldn’t enunciate why outside of “that’s not how you typically start off a modoy and atmospheric horror movie”. Much later, I would realize it was a pretty good signal that EH was simply a product of it’s times. Most of the 90s was a horror wasteland. EH was typical by the numbers studio fare.

To me, Life’s ~66% RT rating says “competent genre fare”, which means something different today than it did in the 90s. To wit: EH was really about the same as 2000’s Supernova (a thoroughly 90s horror movie): bland and forgettable. I am guessing Life will be much better, if not exactly ground breaking. I’m behind on movies but I’m hoping to catch it in the theater myself.

[quote=“divedivedive, post:10, topic:129042, full:true”]
Wait sorry to derail, but what did you think you were getting out of Event Horizon? Was it not fairly upfront about what it was going to be? I have only ever seen this in cable but I really dug it as a slightly higher budget B-movie.[/quote]

It was a LONG time ago, but I went into Event Horizon expecting a late-90s space adventure (Independence Day, ST: First Contact, The Arrival), not a “Hellraiser” style gore-fest. Whatever trailer I saw made it seem like an action/adventure with lots of explosions and depressurization and whatnot. It was clear it was not a comedy, but it didn’t really show you what it really was.

Here is my (shameful) story on this: My wife and I wanted to see a movie. She was massively pregnant with our first kid, and actually a couple weeks overdue. The doctors were making noises about inducing labor and/or C-sections because the baby was so damned big and getting bigger. So we decided to see a movie because various old-wives tales and conventional wisdom said that the noise and/or adrenaline from seeing a movie in the theaters might get stuff moving down there.

I forget what my wife suggested… based on the date, I’m going to say “The Full Monty”. I convinced her that something more action-packed was a better choice.

I don’t think that it’s an exaggeration to say that this resulted in the biggest “fight” in our then 3-year-old marriage. I put “fight” in quotes because it was entirely one-sided and I didn’t do anything but abjectly apologize and beg forgiveness, but she was PISSED OFF at me for the next two weeks, and I only redeemed myself by not screwing up the whole delivery-room hand-holding thing.

ha-ha you offered a differing opinion to a woman who was 9 months pregnant.

This movie was soooooo many missed opportunities in one film. And I saw the ending coming a mile away.

Also I dunno, talking a very pregnant woman into seeing Event Horizon instead of The Full Monty … I am with her, that is divorce material right there.

I went to see Event Horizon with two coworkers, I thought it might be Doom like space demon hell fun, but even then, I remember them both being kinda pissed about the movie selection afterward…

Just saw this on Netflix and my trailer analysis was spot on. Movie scientists should know better by now.

But we enjoyed it nevertheless. My daughter just had her birthday and it was a nice way to celebrate her being officially allowed to watch a movie rated 15 :)