In Space, No One Can Read Your Credits

About ten years or so ago, McFarlane Toys put out a series of 3D movie "posters," which recreated famous film ads with sculpted details. I bought this ALIEN one back in the day. It's kind of cool, as the egg in the center lights up.

Recently I was digging through some stuff and found it again. I honestly forgot I even had it (a sure sign that one has too much crap!). As I was looking for a place to finally hang it, I noticed something odd...

Not sure if you can see it, but check out the credits at the bottom. Instead of listing actors Tom Skerritt, Sigourney Weaver, Veronica Cartwright, John Hurt and Ian Holm, it says, "Captain A.J. Dallas," "Warrant Officer E.L. Ripley," "Navigator J.M. Lambert," "Engineer G.W. Kane" and "Science Office Ash."

What the hell? Why would it list the CHARACTER names instead of the actors? I've never seen anything remotely like that before. Was this a royalty thing? I know that companies have to pay licensing fees to use an actor's LIKENESS, but I've never heard of not being able to simply use their name before. 

Heck, their real names are on the real movie poster, so why can't they use it on this recreation?

It's a mystery!

In Space, No One Can Hear You Celebrate The 40th Anniversary Of ALIEN

Happy 40th Anniversary to Ridley Scott's awesome sci-fi/horror masterpiece, ALIEN. 

Forty years? That can't possibly be right. I can clearly remember going to see it in the theater twenty years ago at most. Something's seriously wrong with the space-time continuum lately. 

ALIEN took a B-movie script and filmed it with an A-movie budget. It's very similar to 1958's It! The Terror From Beyond Space, which featured a crew of astronauts battling a monster that's stowed away on their ship. 

Screenwriter Dan O'Bannon wasn't shy about this similarity, saying, "I didn't steal ALIEN from anybody. I stole it from everybody!" O'Bannon cites The Thing from Another World,  Forbidden Planet and Planet of the Vampires as influences on his script. 

ALIEN also took a page from Star Wars, giving us a spaceship that looked run-down, dirty and most importantly, lived in. Gone were the pristine corridors of Star Trek's star ship Enterprise, replaced instead with grease-stained tech and steam-spewing machinery.

It was also populated with a cast of characters who were more like space truckers rather than officers and astronauts.

The titular creature was designed by Swiss artist HR Giger, who created a realistic and frighteningly plausible monster, one with a disturbing and nightmarish life cycle. Chest Burster, anyone?

ALIEN was a massive hit, grossing an astonishing $101 million dollars worldwide (in 1979 dollars) against its minuscule $11 million budget! You know what that means! Imitators! It didn't take long before dozens of copycat films littered the cineplex. Of course few if any had the success of the original.

I like ALIEN quite a bit, and it had a huge influence on my young mind. I live James Cameron's sequel— the imaginatively titled ALIENS— even more. It's really too bad those two films are the only ones in the franchise (wink wink). 

In Space, No One Can Hear You Retch

For several years now, toy company NECA has been making highly detailed action figures from the various ALIEN movies. This week they released a figure of the terrifying alien hybrid from ALIEN: Resurrection.

Hmm. Admittedly it's been a while since I've seen the movie, but I don't remember the alien sporting a... gigantic infected vagina like the figure appears to have.

It Came From The Cineplex: ALIEN: Covenant

ALIEN: Covenant was written by John Logan and Dante Harper, with "story by" credit by Jack Paglen and Michael Green. It was directed by Ridley Scott.

Logan is a VERY uneven screenwriter, who previously wrote Bats, Any Given Sunday, Gladiator, The Time Machine, Star Trek: Nemesis, Sinbad: Legend Of The Seven Seas, The Last Samurai, The Aviator, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street, Rango, Coriolanus, Hugo, Skyfall, Spectre and Genius. Whew!

Harper has worked extensively in Hollywood as a production manager, and has exactly one writing credit under his belt— this one!

Paglen previously wrote Transcendence, and that's about it. Green has worked mostly in TV, but also wrote Green Lantern and Logan. Talk about a checkered career!

Ridley Scott is of course a prolific and VERY esoteric director, who previously helmed The Duelists, ALIEN, Blade Runner, Legend, Someone To Watch Over Me, Black Rain, Thelma & Louise, 1482: Conquest Of Paradise, White Squall, G.I. Jane, Gladiator, Hannibal, Black Hawk Down, Matchstick Men, Kingdom Of Heaven, A Good Year, American Gangster, Body Of Lies, Robin Hood, Prometheus, The Counselor, Exodus: Gods And Kings and The Martian.

ALIEN: Covenant is of course a sequel to Prometheus, and yet another prequel to the ALIEN Quadrology.

I have an odd love/hate relationship with this franchise. I like ALIEN a lot, and I absolutely love ALIENS. It's one of my all-time favorite movies, and I've probably seen it fifty times. 

After that things take a turn for the worse. I've never watched ALIEN 3 and never will, due to the shoddy way it disposed of Newt, Hicks and Bishop. I strongly feel the characters deserved a better fate than to be killed— offscreen and in their sleep, yet— before the movie even began. I wasn't thrilled with ALIEN: Resurrection either, and absolutely hated Prometheus (even though I gave it a B in my review of it several years ago— I'm working toward being harder on mediocre movies). Sadly, ALIEN: Covenant hasn't changed my attitude toward the series. In my mind the first ALIEN and ALIENS are the only two films in the franchise. All the other movies are nothing more than elaborate, non-canon fan fiction.

Despite the fact that I didn't care for Prometheus, I recently rewatched it to refresh my memory before seeing the new film. Oddly enough I didn't hate it quite as much on second viewing. I still don't particularly like it, but I kind of see what Scott was going for, and I appreciate the fact that he at least tried something different with the film instead of simply rehashing ALIEN for a fourth time.

Unfortunately, that "trying something different" is what made Prometheus so divisive among fans. Half of them liked the bold new direction, while the other half loudly complained that it didn't look and feel like an ALIEN movie. Both camps had a point!

If Scott had simply made a brand new sci-fi story about the extraterrestrial Engineers and the origins of man that had no ties to the ALIEN universe, Prometheus would have been much more successful, and viewers wouldn't have sat there complaining, "Yeah, yeah, this is all very interesting, but when are we gonna see some xenomorphs?"

I'm convinced that Scott took all the Prometheus criticism to heart and attempted a course correction with ALIEN: Covenant. Heck, all you have to do is look at the title for proof of that! Gone are the lofty questions about the origins of man, the nature of life and the search for answers, replaced instead with safe, familiar tropes like deadly aliens and lots of running through dark spaceship corridors.

This dumbed-down, rehashed approach is the most annoying and infuriating thing about Covenant, as it renders Prometheus completely moot. Seriously, there's now absolutely no point in ever watching Prometheus again!

OK, to recap for those of you who've forgotten or never seen the film, Prometheus tells us that millions of years ago, a race of giant blue aliens called Engineers came to Earth and jumpstarted all life here.

Cut to the near future, where Dr. Elizabeth Shaw discovers cave paintings featuring a map to the an Engineer planet, which she sees as an invitation to come pay them a visit when we're able.

Shaw convinces trillionaire Peter Weyland to mount an expedition to the planet, called LV-223. There they find a large structure filled with containers full of black goo. This goo infects several crew members, causing deadly lifeforms to erupt from their bodies. 

Shaw and David the android discover an Engineer who's still alive, who plans to take a ship full of goo back to Earth to wipe out humanity. Fortunately she and David are able to stop him and save the day. At the end of the film, the two of them take off in search of the Engineer Homeworld, to personally ask them why they created and then tried to kill us.

Thanks to Covenant, that "Search For Answers" plotline in Prometheus is now a dead end, which will never explored or resolved. Even worse, Elizabeth Shaw was apparently killed offscreen prior to the new film. So we all sat through Prometheus for absolutely nothing. Thanks, Ridley Scott!
Structurally, Covenant is a mess. It shares the same problem as all prequels— there's no reason for it to exist (other than money), as it over-explains things that didn't need explaining, and de-mystifies the mythology. The xenomorph in ALIEN was legitimately terrifying. Unfortunately the The more we find out about them and their backstory, the less frightening they are. It's called fear of the unknown.

Apart from the android twins David and Walter, there's not a single interesting or compelling character in the film. The only one that comes close to standing out at all is Daniels, who comes off as a Ripley 2.0 (or I guess 1.0, since this is a prequel). But even in her case, we find out precious little about her, other than that she's a badass.

The rest of the cast are completely forgettable ciphers, existing only so they can be killed. In fact I wonder why the screenwriters bothered to give them names. They might as well be called Victim #1, Meatbag #3 and so on.

Covenant is not a movie so much as it's a highlight reel of the previous films. It's ALIEN'S Greatest Hits. It freely and shamelessly borrows the best bits from all over the franchise, cobbling them together into a Franken-film. It even liberally borrows elements from Jerry Goldsmith's iconic score from ALIEN! I'm not making that up either, as it's confirmed in the end credits.

Unfortunately it seems (for now) to step on previously established continuity, and raises more questions than it answers. This is just going to end up pissing off fans of the earlier films, like myself.

Please, for the love of god, somebody stop Ridley Scott before he directs again. He's flushing the ALIEN franchise right down the crapper, with no end in sight. In fact, earlier this year in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, Scott claims he has ideas for SIX more ALIEN prequels after this one! SIX! That would put the total number of prequels to the original film at eight! That's insane.

This situation reminds me of "the talk" that all adult children eventually have to have with their elderly parents. You know, the one in which they have to take away their car keys and tell them they can no longer drive. Ridley Scott's kids need to take his director's megaphone away from him, and tell him it's time to stop ruining the ALIEN movies.

So far the film's underperforming here in the States, grossing just $71 million against its $97 million budget. It's done a bit better overseas, where it's raked in $110 million, for a total of $181 million. That's about the break even point, but I honestly don't see it making much more than that, especially with a dozen more summer blockbusters waiting in the wings.

SPOILERS!

The Plot:
We begin with a pre-Prometheus prologue, in which Peter Weyland (played by Guy Pearce), trillionaire founder of the Weyland/Yutani Corporation, activates the newly created android David (played by Michael Fassbender). This is the same David that will eventually wreak havoc in Prometheus, the previous film. Weyland says that one day he and David will search the stars to find mankind's creator. David wonders why he has to defer to puny humans, since he's immortal and they're not (uh-oh). He begins thinking he should serve whoever or whatever created mankind. Weyland angrily tries to shut down this dangerous line of thinking.

Years later in 2104, the USCSS Covenant is heading for the planet Origae-6 to start a colony there. The ship has a crew of fifteen, all of whom are in hypersleep. Also on board are two thousand frozen colonists, along with several thousand freeze-dried embryos which will be grown once they reach their destination. They're all cared for by Walter, an android of the same series as David, who looks exactly like him (Plot Point!).

Walter quietly tends to the ship and dormant crew for seven years, with the help of MU.TH.UR., aka "MOTHER," the ship's computer. Suddenly the Convenant's hit by a violent neutrino burst from a nearby star, causing major damage. Walter wakes the crew from hypersleep to help deal with the crisis. Unfortunately Captain Branson's cryotube is damaged and bursts into flames. He roasts alive inside the tube (!), much to the horror of his wife and second in command, Daniels (played by Katherine Waterston). The crew gets the ship back under control, but are saddened that forty seven of the frozen colonists were killed in the accident.

Command then falls to First Officer Oram (played by Billy Crudup), a highly religious, yet extremely unsure man. The crew has a short funeral for Branson before shooting his body into outer space. This irritates Oram, who for some reason forbid the crew from holding a service. The grieving Daniels confides in Walter, telling him that she and Branson planned to build a log cabin together when they got to Origae-6 (Another Plot Point!). She takes a nail they planned to use to build the cabin and makes a pendant out of it (which makes this Chekov's Nail).

Oram and Tennessee (played by Danny McBride), the ship's pilot, go on a spacewalk to repair the exterior damage. Tennessee picks up a faint distress signal, recognizing it as a human voice singing John Denver's Country Road. They trace the signal to a nearby planet, which scans indicate may be more hospitable than their actual destination (?). 

Against all logic and reason, Oram makes the incredibly reckess decision to divert the colony ship from its predetermined route and investigate the planet. Daniels protests (and rightly so), but is overruled, as no one wants to get back in the cryochambers and risk getting fried like Branson (!).

The ship arrives at the uncharted planet a few weeks later. Tennessee, Ricks and Upworth (don't bother trying to remember the names of these barely introduced characters) stay in orbit on the Covenant while the rest of the crew takes the one and only dropship down to the planet. They stupidly waltz off the ship without any protective gear whatsoever. As they walk through a lush field, they notice it's filled with wheat plants from Earth, and wonder how such a thing's possible. Daniel's points out that the planet's eerily quiet, as there are no animal or insect lifeforms to be found anywhere.

As they continue exploring, Ledward, a member of the security team, steps on a cluster of mushroom-like plants, causing alien spores to spew into the air. They fly around like cartoon bees and zoom right into his ear, infecting him. He stays behind to guard Oram's wife Karine, who takes samples of the local flora.

The crew then spots a crashed, horseshoe-shaped Engineer spaceship at the top of a mountain. They climb up to the ship and enter through a hole punched in the hull. As they wander around the interior of the ship, Daniels finds a set of dog tags labelled Dr. E. Shaw (the heroine of Prometheus). They also find her automatic distress signal and shut it off. Hallet is infected by additional spores that fly up his nose. Too bad these people didn't have some kind of... oh, I dunno... spacesuits to protect them from this sort of thing.

Ledward becomes violently ill from his spore infection, and Karine rushes him back to the dropship. She takes him to the medbay (that is one well-equipped dropship) for treatment. He becomes increasingly worse, until utimately a neomorph bursts from his back. Faris sees this and immediately seals the medbay, locking Karine inside with the creature. Karine pleads with Faris to let her out, but she refuses. The neomorph attacks Karine, and she fights it off for a while before it overpowers and kills her.

The neomorph easily breaks out of the medbay and starts scuttling all over the ship. Faris grabs a gun and shoots at it, accidentally hitting a rack of flammable tanks. The tanks explode, killing her and completely destroying the dropship (!). Somehow the neomorph escapes. The rest of the crew return just in time to see their ride go up in flames. Suddenly another neomorph explodes from Hallet's throat and disappears into the brush.

The two neomorphs grow up fast, and begin attacking the surviving crew. Ankor is killed, and Walter saves Daniels by jamming his left hand down a neomorph's throat. Unfortunately its acid blood burns off his left hand. The crew manages to kill one of the neomorphs, while the other's scared away by Obi-Wan Kenobi, er, I mean a mysterious, hooded figure. Gosh, I wonder who it could be?

Having no other choice— since amazingly there was only one dropship on the Convenant— the survivors follow the hooded figure. He leads them through a ruined city littered with hundreds of Engineer corpses. They enter a temple and the figure removes its hood. To absolutely no one's surprise, it turns out to be David, whose head was apparently reattached to his body sometime after the events of Prometheus. He assures them they're safe inside the temple.

Daniels asks David what happened to the city. He explains that he and Elizabeth Shaw arrived on the planet ten years ago in their borrowed Engineer horseshoe ship. Unfortunately the ship's cargo of black goo was somehow "accidentally" released over the city, destroying the populace. For some reason, the ship then crashed on the mountaintop, killing Shaw and leaving David the only inhabitant of the planet. Sure, sounds believable to me.

Daniels radios the Covenant, but they can't land the ship due to a massive and intense storm in the area (which we inexplicably never see on the surface). In the temple, David chats with Walter, who's sort of his descendent. David's surprised and upset that Walter isn't programmed with an imagination. Walter says that humans were freaked out by the David series' capacity for creative thought and removed it in subsequent models like himself. David then tries to teach Walter to play the flute, which isn't the least bit sexually suggestive at all.

Rosenthal is separated from the group and decapitated by the surviving neomorph. David discovers her body, and tries communicating with the alien. Oram walks in, sees what's going on and kills the neomorph, angering David. Oram demands to know what's really going on, and David reveals that for the past ten years he's been experimenting with the black goo, attempting to genetically engineer a perfect new species— the xenomorphs.

He takes Oram down to an underground chamber, filled with the familiar eggs from ALIEN. One of the eggs opens, and Oram stupidly sticks his head right over it, as a facehugger flies out and implants an embryo in him. A chestburster erupts from his body a few minutes later.

David tries to turn Walter to his side, telling them that humanity is an inferior species that should be wiped out. When Walter disagrees, David violently stabs him in the neck with his flute, causing him to spew milky white fluid from his wound, which, once again isn't the least bit sexually suggestive at all. Walter seemingly "dies," and David leaves. A closeup reveals Walter's neck wound slowly healing itself...

The security team comes to investigate Oram's disappearance, and Lope is attacked by another facehugger. Cole cuts it off him, but its acid blood severely burns Lope's face in the process. Cole's killed by a now full-sized xenomorph (that apparently grew to adulthood in a matter of two minutes), as Lope limps the hell out of there.

Meanwhile, Tennessee's wringing his hands back the Covenant, worried about his wife Faris (who he doesn't know is dead) and the rest of the crew. He overrides MOTHER's safety protocols and takes the ship down into the storm in an effort to reestablish communications.

Daniels wanders into David's chamber of horrors, and sees drawings he made of Shaw's disemboweled body. She realizes Shaw didn't die in the crash after all, and David killed her. She confronts him, and he admits he experimented on Shaw's body. David attacks Daniels, who stabs him in the throat with her nail pendant. David shrugs off the injury and pulls out the nail. He attacks Daniels again, but she's saved by the timely appearance of Walter, who, being a more advanced model of android, managed to heal himself.

Walter and David have a brutal battle, as Daniels flees the temple. She and the injured Lope manage to contact the Covenant, which is being buffeted by the dangerous storm (that we still can't see on the surface). Tennessee doesn't dare lower the ship any farther, but Daniels suggests flying the sturdy cargo sled down to the surface.

Daniels and Lope rush out to the landing area to wait for rescue. They're joined by Walter, who apparently "killed" David while we weren't looking. Never mind that no director with an ounce of sanity would ever allow a villain to be killed offscreen— this is really Walter! He's missing his left hand and everything!

Tennessee flies the sled down to the surface, and the three leap onto it. As it's about to take off, a xenomoprh climbs on as well. It tries to smash its head through the sled's cockpit to get to Tennessee, but Daniels manages to grab it with the claws of a crane (cough power loader cough), perfectly recreating the "Get away from her you BITCH" moment from ALIENS. She manages to crush the xenomorph and fling it into the air, as the sled rockets back into space.

Back on the Covenant, the survivors recover and prepare to resume course to Origae-6. Unfortunately they find Lope's been killed by a chestburster, meaning there's now an adult xenomorph on board. The creature kills Ricks and Upworth while they're in the shower, as the movie decides to try and remake ALIEN in its final fifteen minutes. Daniels and Tennessee lure it into the terraforming bay. Daniels locks it inside a large utility vehicle, which she then jettisons out the airlock (Wow, blasting a xenomorph into space? Never seen that before!).

The crisis averted, Daniels and Tennessee (the only surviving members of the crew) climb into their cryochambers. As Walter's tucking Daniels in, she mentions the cabin she and her late husband planned to build on Origae-6. Walter doesn't know what she's talking about, and Daniels realizes he's actually David, in the LEAST surprising plot twist of all time. She's horrified when she realizes what David will do to the two thousand frozen colonists on board, and begins shrieking and pounding on the cryochamber lid before it puts her back to sleep.

David goes to the hypersleep bay and observes his new frozen test subjects. He vomits up two facehugger embryos (?) and places them into cold storage. He (as Walter) makes a log entry, noting that all crew members except Daniels and Tennessee were killed in the neutrino blast (??).

Thoughts:
• As long-time readers of Bob Canada's BlogWorld all know by now, I hate it when a "futuristic" movie is filled with all sorts of high-tech gadgetry and is set in a society radically different from out own— and then takes place in the far off year of 2030.

ALIEN: Covenant is one to these films, as it's set just eighty seven short years from now. I ABSOLUTELY GUARANTEE you there's no way in hell we'll have terraforming, colony ships, warp drives or androids indistinguishable from humans by that point. Hell, even if they started today, it would take NASA twenty years or more to send a manned ship back to our own Moon. And a Mars mission is even farther away.

Would it have killed them to have set the story three or four hundred years from now?

• James Franco has an uncredited role as Captain Branson, who dies in a horrific fire inside a cryotube within the first five minutes of the film. Actually it's impossible to tell it's Franco or anyone else during the death scene.

He shows up briefly again a bit later, as Daniels watches a video of him mountain climbing.

So why would the producers go to the trouble of casting a recognizable actor for such a short and distracting cameo? Welp, it's because Franco's role was originally a bit bigger, but was cut for time. You can see more of him in an online-only "prologue" called Last Supper.

By the way, when Daniels watches the video of Branson mountain climbing, it's impossible not to think of Franco in 124 Hours.

• Speaking of the cryotubes, why is it even possible to be incinerated inside one? Aren't they supposed to freeze you? Why's there anything incendiary in there?

• The movie goes out of its way to point out that Oram is an "extremely religious" man, implying this is a rarity in the future. Yet when the crew wants to hold a short memorial service for Captain Branson, Oram forbids it, saying there are more important duties to perform.

If he's so damned religious, why would he object to a funeral service? You'd think he'd have been the first one to suggest it, so he could get out his Bible and start thumping it!

• As everyone knows by now, every movie in the ALIEN franchise tells the exact same story over and over— people find aliens, aliens kill people, lady kills alien and survives. In an effort to lessen this repetition a bit, each film has featured a different group of victims, er, I mean characters.

ALIEN: Space Truckers
ALIENS: Space Marines
ALIEN 3: Prisoners
ALIEN Resurrection: Mercenaries
Prometheus: Scientists
ALIEN: Covenant: Colonists

Not a nitpick, just an observation.

• It's kind of disheartening to see people smoking in this movie. Surely by 2104 humanity will have wised up and kicked that filthy habit? On the other hand, smoking was still rampant in ALIENS as well, which was set in 2179. I guess people never learn.

• The crew picks up Shaw's automated distress signal, and discovers it's coming from a relatively nearby planet. After scanning the planet, Oram says it looks more promising than their destination of Origae-6, and wants to divert the ship there.

No. NO! Absolutely not! Bad movie! BAD! Go to your room, Ridley Scott, and don't come out until you're ready to direct something that's not so stupid.

The Covenant's mission is not something that was slapped together overnight. It no doubt required years of planning and research. Scientists studied hundreds, maybe thousands of planets, and designated Origae-6 as the best possible candidate for colonization. A crew was then chosen and trained for months, maybe years to prepare them for the conditions they'd encounter on that particular planet. Equipment was selected and loaded, based on the conditions they'd encounter on their new world. Then there's the fuel situation. We don't know exactly what powers the Covenant, but it's entirely possible it has just enough fuel to make it to Origae-6 and no farther.

And then Oram casually throws all that careful planning out the window by saying, "Hey guys, let's check out that completely unknown planet over there!"

This is something that would NEVER, EVER happen on any kind of expedition, and it was so monumentally stupid it actually made me angry there in my theater seat. Daniels should have declared him unfit for duty and assumed command right then and there.

• Why the hell is there only one dropship on the Covenant? That just seems like poor planning. They're millions of light years from Earth. If something happens to it, as it does here, they don't have a backup and there ain't anywhere to go for a replacement.

• I pointed this out several times in the plot, but it bears repeating. Over and over during the movie, we're told that the Covenant can't land on the planet's surface because there's a violent storm blanketing the area.

Yet whenever we cut to the surface of the planet, there's absolutely NO evidence of this. No wind, no thunder or lighting, no ominous clouds. Not even a single drop of rain. Chalk it up to bizarre alien weather that's invisible from the ground, I guess.

• Everyone and their dog has already pointed this out, but it bears repeating— after the dropship lands, the colonists all stupidly walk out and casually stroll around the planet with absolutely NO protective gear whatsoever. Not even so much as a cotton face mask. Wait, wait, strike that. They DO wear fetching little hats with a protective flap in back, so there you go. Safety first!

No one thinks to run any checks for hostile lifeforms, dangerous bacteria or harmful radiation. Naturally it isn't long before one of the crew members becomes infected by alien spores.

The crew in Prometheus acted like idiots as well, trying to pet alien cobra things and bringing potentially harmful organisms onboard their ship. Even so, they look like geniuses next to the Covenant staff.

To make matters even worse, we see they have a little wheeled drone that trundles down the ramp AFTER everyone's already disembarked. They could have easily sent this drone out in advance to have it test the air and see if protective gear was necessary or not. The thing's right there on the ship— why not use it?

Look, I get it. If they'd have used the drone, it would have detected the spores, they'd have said, "Let's get the hell out of here" and then the movie would have been over (if only). But surely there was a less clumsy and obvious way to jumpstart the plot.

• When Ledward steps on the extraterrestrial puffball, he releases a swarm of spores that form various geometric shapes as they fly through the air, before making a beeline for his nearest open orifice.

As they do so, it's impossible not to think of old cartoons featuring swarms of bees that form weapons and such.

• After Ledward's infected, an alien creature bursts from his back, rather than his chest, as is traditional in this films. SEE, GUYS? This movie's COMPLETELY different from ALIEN! It's got backbursters!

• How are the xenomorphs growing to adulthood so fast in this movie? Granted, the previous films have never given us a timetable for their life cycle, but it seems like it took a few hours at least to go from facehugger to chestburster to adult. In Covenant it seems like they're growing to full size in literally minutes.

• Credit where credits's due, ALIEN: Covenant looks amazing, as all of Ridley Scott's films do. The David/Walter "twin" effects in particular were very well done. I just wish Scott put as much time into the story as he does his effects.

• David brags that he has the ability to imagine and create, which is something Walter doesn't have the capability to do. Walter explains that androids from the David series were a little too human, and made people uncomfortable. So the Walter series was deliberately designed to be more robot-like to avoid the "uncanny valley" effect.

This is the exact same plotline that was featured in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Datalore. In that episode, Data the android finds out he has an"older brother" named Lore, who acts much more naturally and can even experience emotions. Lore made the humans around him uncomfortable, so he was deactivated and the less-realistic Data was created as a substitute.

There's no doubt in my mind that Covenant stole this idea from Star Trek. It's so blatant it's actually shocking.

• After finding out that Walter isn't programmed with creativity, David attempts to teach him how to play the flute. As the lesson progresses, David slowly moves in closer and closer, gently guiding Walter's hand over the holes in the flute. Subtle!

This had to be the most obvious and downright WEIRD sex scene in cinema history. Flagrant doesn't even begin to describe it. If you've ever wanted to see Michael Fassbender shamelessly flirt with himself, this is the movie for you.

• At one point David takes Oram into his xenomorph birthing room, and shows him an alien egg. The top of the egg opens up, and Oram literally sticks his head down into it to get himself a better look at what's inside. Naturally a second later a facehugger springs out and wraps itself around his head (though it didn't have very far to spring).

This may have been the stupidest and most laughable scene in the entire franchise. I hope actor Billy Crudup was embarrassed at having to film it.

• At the end of the film, it's revealed that David actually switched places with Walter, in one of the most telegraphed "plot twists" I've ever seen.

Seriously, is there anyone who DIDN'T see this switch coming? The second that Walter got his hand burned off, I knew that would become a plot point, as it was an obvious way of identifying the identical androids from one another. Why hobble a character that way unless it was going to pay off somehow later on?

Later on David and Walter have an epic android on android battle. The movie turns its attention away from them for a bit, and then suddenly Walter appears, saying he "killed" David offscreen. It seems odd for a major character to die offscreen, but it must be true, as this is definitely Walter. After, all, he's missing his left hand! Eh? EH?

Then at the very end we find out that Walter is really David after all. To absolutely no one's surprise, he apparently burned off his own hand to imitate Walter so he could infiltrate the Convenant and continue his weirdo xenomorph experiments.

It was all so obvious. The movie has two identical characters, one good and one evil. Suddenly one disappears, and we're told he died offscreen. No movie would EVER do that, unless it was trying to set up a twist ending. It's Screenwriting 101. The most frustrating thing about it was how long it went on, to the point where the audience was practically yelling at the screen for the movie to reveal the twist already.

• By the way, it's established earlier in the film that David can't heal injuries, but Walter, being a later and more advanced model, can. Unless his hand gets burned off. I guess that's too big an injury for him to heal.

When David attacks Daniels, she stabs him in the chin with a nail. Later on when he's impersonating Walter, the chin wound is inexplicably gone.  Did David fill in the hole with putty?

• As I said earlier, ALIEN: Covenant plays out like the Greatest Hits of the franchise, borrowing elements from almost all the previous films. Amazingly, it even cribs a few things from Blade Runner, which was also directed by Ridley Scott.

The first third of the film, in which the crew lands on the planet, finds an alien ship and explores it, is practically a scene for scene remake of Prometheus.

The final fifteen or twenty minutes of the film are a condensed version of ALIEN, as a xenomorph gets loose on the ship. It kills several crew members before it's herded into a cargo bay and blasted into space.

The galley and dimly-lit corridors of the Covenant look amazingly like those of the Nostromo in ALIEN.

When the cargo sled lands, Daniels, Lope and Walter jump onto it. Unfortunately, so does a xenomorph. Daniels uses an industrial crane attached to the sled to fight the alien, ultimately grabbing it with a giant mechanical claw. This entire scene is lifted wholesale from the end of ALIENS.

This movie contains a scene where a toy bird drinking water is visable. In the opening scene of the original ALIEN (1979) there is another toy bird shown.

We see the xenomorph's point of view here, getting a glimpse of how they somehow see the world even though they don't have any visible eyes. This Alien POV is something that first appeared in ALIEN 3.

David tells Oram that the xenomorphs are the "perfect organism." This is exactly what the evil android Ash said about them in ALIEN.

David gives Walter a gentle kiss right before he stabs him. Roy Batty does the exact same thing to his creator Dr. Tyrell, right before he crushes his head in Blade Runner.

When David attacks Daniels, she stabs him in the throat with a large nail. David shrugs off the injury and says, "That's the spirit!" to her. This is the same line Roy Batty said during his fight with Deckard in Blade Runner.

• Sadly, ALIEN: Covenant raises far more questions than it bothers to answer. It's unclear at this point whether Ridley Scott just doesn't know the answers, or if he's saving them for the next film. Here are a few of the questions that came to mind while watching:

David arrives on the Engineer planet in his stolen horseshoe-shaped ship. For some reason, he then releases canisters of black goo onto the capital (and only?) city, which kills the entire population of Engineers. Why does he kill them? Your guess is as good as mine.

Supposedly David is the one who single-handedly created the xenomorph species we all know and love by experimenting and cross-breeding the neomorphs. Just one question— where'd he get his test subjects? The species reproduces by infecting a host, much like a giant virus. David killed all the Engineers, so there were no hosts left. Did he somehow cross the neomorphs with each other?

Where does the xenomorph queen fit into all this? In ALIENS we saw that the queen is the one who lays the eggs. In Covenant, David somehow has an entire room full of eggs, but there's no queen to be seen anywhere. The queen wasn't in the original ALIEN, which was directed by Ridley Scott— she was invented for ALIENS by James Cameron and Stan Winston. Is Scott deliberately ignoring the queen?

One would assume the Covenant has various access codes and other security measures onboard. How's David gonna deal with those when he's impersonating Walter? Did he somehow upload Walter's codes before he killed him?

Back on board the Covenant, David puts Daniels and Tennessee into their cyrochambers. This makes sense, as he no doubt wants to use them as test subjects in his xenomorph experiments. But then he makes a log entry (as Walter) saying everyone but Daniels and Tennessee was killed in the neutrino blast. Why not say ALL the crew was killed? Does he think it would look suspicious if he said they all died? Plus, Daniels knows that David isn't really Walter now, so I can't imagine he'd let her live.

At the end of the film, David regurgitates two tiny facehugger embryos and places them in a freeze chamber for later experiments. Um... don't the facehuggers hatch from eggs? Did he break open a couple of eggs & swallow what was inside?

Since this is a prequel, the events of ALIEN haven't yet happened. Despite the fact that we just saw David seemingly wipe out the Engineer race, at some point in the future one of them HAS to crash a ship full of xenomorph eggs on LV-426, for the crew of the Nostromo to find. But if David is the one who created the eggs, where does the Engineer get a cargo hold full of them?

I'm told that the novelization and online articles clear up some of these nagging questions. I don't care. I shouldn't have to do homework in order to understand a goddamned movie. If the answers can't be found on the screen, then the director failed at his job.

ALIEN: Covenant is yet another of Ridley Scott's seemingly interminable prequels to the ALIEN franchise. Unfortunately, it completely torpedoes the lofty questions raised by its predecessor Prometheus, as it forgoes intellectualism for action. It's less a movie as it is a Greatest Hits reel of the entire series, and raises far more questions than it answers. Skip it and watch ALIEN or ALIENS instead. I give it a C+.

It Came From The Cineplex: Life

Life was written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, and directed by Daniel Espinosa

Reese and Wernick are working partners with very checkered careers. In addition to working on several TV series and reality shows, they previously wrote Clifford's Really Big Movie (!), Zombieland, G.I. Joe: Retaliation and Deadpool (!!!).

Espinosa previously directed Babylonsjukan (?), Outside Love, Easy Money, Safe House and Child 44. Of those, the only one I've ever heard of is Safe House, which coincidentally also starred Ryan Reynolds.

When Ridley Scott's ALIEN premiered in 1979, many critics called it "A B-movie with an A-movie cast and budget." They weren't wrong. Not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you! It was interesting to see such a cliched and schlock concept like "People Trapped Inside Spaceship With Alien Monster" given such red carpet treatment.

Well, here we are in 2017 and history's repeating itself all over again. Life is most definitely a B-Movie with an A-Movie cast and budget. It's a modern day remake of ALIEN, which was a remake of It: The Terror From Beyond Space!, which was probably a remake of an even earlier film. 

Life follows ALIEN's template beat for beat, going so far as to recreate entire scenes, right down to the stage directions! Life definitely looks great, and features a cast of top-notch performers, but it's all in service of a derivative and highly predictable script.

Heck, even the poster does its best to ape ALIEN, what with the dark background, the circular central element and even the wide-spaced typography!

Life isn't content just to copy from ALIEN. It also cribs scenes wholesale from Gravity, along with elements from The Martian and even Avatar! It just can't help itself!

Say... an expensive, unoriginal and disappointing sci-fi film that was dumped into theaters near the beginning of the year... You don't suppose... Could it be? What studio produced this fiasco anyway?

Oh dear... 

"Dere's yer problem right there, lady! You gotcha self a Sony pitcher on yer hands!"

HA! I knew it! Life is brought to us by the fine people at Sony, the gold standard of movie studios (and my former employers!). Why, in just the past three years, Sony's produced such wonderful films as:

The Monuments Men • Robocop (2014)

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 • 22 Jump Street • Think Like A Man Too

Sex Tape • The Equalizer • Fury • The Interview • Chappie

Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 • Aloha • Pixels • Ricki and the Flash 

Hotel Transylvania 2 • The Walk • Goosebumps • Freaks of Nature 

Spectre • The Night Before • The 5th Wave • The Brothers Grimsby

Money Monster • Angry Birds • The Shallows • Ghostbusters 2016

Sausage Party • The Magnificent Seven • Inferno • Passengers

Resident Evil: The Final Chapter • Underworld: Blood Wars

With a track record like that, Sony's Life couldn't possibly be anything but a hit, right? Right?

Life's startling similarity to ALIEN even affected its release date! Life was originally scheduled to slither into theaters this coming Memorial Day weekend, but it was moved up to March at the last minute. Why? No doubt to avoid competition with ALIEN: Covenant,  Ridley Scott's latest remake of ALIEN, er, I mean prequel to ALIEN, which also comes out in May.

Sony obviously didn't want the two films in theaters at the same time, since they're basically the same goddamned movie.

Also, I'm assuming the trailer means "Memorial Day WEEKEND," as Memorial Day is always on a Monday, and it seems unlikely a film would premiere at the beginning of the week.

By the way, if you insist on seeing this film despite my warnings, do yourself a favor and DO NOT watch the trailer beforehand. It is literally a two minute version of the film, spelling out every single plot point except for the ending (although it actually includes a couple quick shots from the final scene!). 

Unfortunately for my former employers, Life looks to be DOA at the box office. After four weeks it's only managed to gross an anemic $28 million against its modest $58 million budget. It's done a bit better overseas, where it raked in $39 million, for a worldwide total of $68 million. Movies these days need to gross about twice their production budget just to break even though, so it looks like Life's a flop.

Sorry, Sony, but that's Life! Get it? That's "life?" Eh? EH?

SPOILERS AHEAD, UNLESS YOU'VE EVER SEEN "ALIEN!"

The Plot:
It's the year 2017, and six astronauts are manning the International Space Station. The crew consists of Dr. David Jordan (played by Jake Gyllenhaal), who's the Senior Medical Officer, Dr. Miranda North, the Quarantine Officer, Rory Adams (played by Ryan Reynolds), the engineer, Sho Kendo, the pilot of the station (um... a space station needs a pilot?), Hugh Derry, a biologist and Katerina Golovkina, the Mission Commander.

As the film opens, the crew's preparing to capture a space probe returning from Mars, in one long, continuous and impressive shot that I'm sure wasn't meant to remind us of Gravity. Rory uses the station's robotic arm to capture the approaching probe and bring it inside. The probe contains a Martian soil sample, which Hugh immediately begins examining. He soon discovers the sample contains a single celled alien organism. It's humanity's first ever confirmation of life on another planet.

Hugh begins playing around with the seemingly dead cell, adjusting the atmosphere inside its sealed chamber and flooding it with an organic growth medium (bad idea). Amazingly, he manages to revive the long-dormant cell (uh-oh). It quickly begins growing into a multi-celled organism, and even responds to stimuli. (not good). Hugh notes that the organism's cells can act as muscle, brain and eye tissue, all at the same time (definitely bad).

The public is informed of the discovery, and a contest is held to name the new life form. A young girl wins the contest and names it Calvin, after her school, Calvin Coolidge Elementary.

Calvin begins growing at an alarming rate (oh, no), as the organism now resembles a translucent starfish. Unfortunately Hugh forgets to close a valve or something, and all the oxygen is vented from the lab, seemingly killing Calvin (good!). Hugh attempts to revive him by administering mild electric shocks with a probe (why?). Calvin is brought back to life, and Hugh continues playing around with him inside his sealed chamber.

Suddenly Calvin wraps himself around Hugh's hand and grips it tightly. Hugh tries to slip his hand out of the quarantine glove built into the side of the chamber, but Calvin won't let go. He eventually crushes the bones in Hugh's hand (in one of the film's most gruesome scenes), allowing him to slip free of the glove.

Amazingly, Calvin then picks up a sharp probe and uses it as a knife to cut through the glove and escape the sealed chamber. That is one smart starfish! He zips over to a table and absorbs a lab rat inside a cage (holy crap!), and then disappears somewhere in the room.

Rory wants to enter the lab and rescue the now unconscious Hugh, but Miranda, who's the Quarantine Office, forbids it, fearing Calvin will escape into the ship. Rory ignores her and enters the room anyway, because he's an idiot and the plot needs to happen. He manages to push Hugh out of the lab, but before he can exit, Calvin latches onto his leg. David seals the lab, locking Rory inside. Rory attacks Calvin with a small flame thrower, but the creature's evidently immune to fire. Calvin slowly slithers up Rory's body, squeezes into his mouth, and kills him from the inside. I guess they couldn't afford Ryan Reynolds for the whole movie?

The flame thrower causes the fire suppression system to activate. Calvin then emerges from Rory's mouth and escapes through the suppression vents, meaning he's now loose on the ship. Katerina sends out an SOS to Earth.

The script continues to check off items on its list of shipboard calamities, as the communication system suddenly goes down, meaning the crew can no longer contact Earth. Whether this was a random occurrence or caused by Calvin is left to our imaginations. Katerina suits up and exits the station to try and fix the antenna. For some reason, Calvin exits the station as well and attacks Katerina in space, wrapping himself around her and squeezing hard. He ruptures her suit's coolant system, which causes liquid to leak into her suit as she becomes the first person to ever drown in outer space!

Calvin then attempts to re-enter the station through its thrusters. Sho activates the rockets, which keep the creature from getting back in. Unfortunately all this thruster-using knocks the ISS into a decaying orbit, meaning it'll burn up in Earth's atmosphere. Sho says their only hope is to use their remaining fuel to restore their orbit, but once that's done Calvin will be able to get back inside.

The crew comes up with a plan to seal themselves into their futuristic sleep chambers and vent the air from the station, which will cause Calvin to become dormant again. Suddenly Hugh enters cardiac arrest, as David uses a defibrillator (the wrong way, of course) to save him. They then see his uniform is pulsating, and realize Calvin's wrapped himself around Hugh's leg and has been secretly feeding on him. He leaps off of Hugh and attacks the crew.

Sho flies through the ship and seals himself in his sleep chamber. Calvin violently tries to break through the glass. David and Miranda lure Calvin away from Sho with Hugh's blood, and trap it inside one of the station's modules. They vent the oxygen from the module to hopefully kill Calvin.

Earth apparently received Katerina's SOS, and sends a Soyuz capsule to the station. This is of course impossible for a numnber of reasons, but let's just move on or we'll be here all day. David assumes the capsule is there to rescue them, but Miranda says it's a final quarantine precaution— it's actually there to shove the station out into deep space, thereby protecting Earth.

The capsule just happens to dock with the module in which Calvin is trapped (of course). Sho exits his chamber and rushes to the module, trying to get into the capsule. He opens the hatch and Calvin kills both him and the Soyuz crew. The capsule then detaches and spins wildly, destroying part of the station.

Damaged beyond repair, the station begins plummeting toward Earth. David realizes that Calvin could possibly survive re-entry and destroy all life on the planet. He comes up with a final, desperate plan. He'll lure Calvin into one of the two escape pods, then fly it off into deep space, while Miranda uses the other pod to return to Earth.

David successfully lures Calvin into his escape pod and blasts off, while Miranda launches hers. Miranda's pod is struck by debris from the station and spins off course. David struggles to control his pod, as Calvin grips the joystick and tries to alter course. The two pods divert and go their separate ways.

Back on Earth, two Asian fisherman see a pod land in the ocean. They paddle over to it and peer into the pod's window. Inside they see David, almost completely covered by Calvin's now giant body, warning. He frantically warns them not to open the capsule, but they don't understand. As the camera pulls back, we see more boats sailing toward the downed capsule. Cut to Miranda shrieking inside her pod as it spins helplessly into deep space.

Thoughts:
• There seems to be great confusion as to just when this film takes place. Many people online are convinced it's set fifteen to thirty years from now. It most certainly is not.

One glance at the beginning of the trailer is all you need to prove that Life takes place here and now in good ol' 2017.

If you're still not convinced, there's further evidence in the film. At one point David says he remembers seeing the Challenger disaster on TV as a child, and how his school sent all the students home afterwards.

The Challenger exploded in 1986. That was thirty one years ago. If David was in first grade (six years old) when it happened, that would make him thirty seven in 2017. Since David looks like he's thirty seven, that means the movie has to take place in the present day.

I suppose you could argue that David's a young-looking forty and the movie takes place in 2020, but because of his Challenger story it can't possibly take place any later than that.

• I can understand the confusion over the film's time period though. Life apparently takes place in a parallel dimension in which space technology is much more advanced than it is in our world. The International Space Station seen in Life is nothing like the one we have now.

Here's the real ISS. See those white tubes in the center? Those are the habitable parts! Not a lot of living space in there. Ninety percent of it appears to be solar panels!

Here's the ISS that appears in the film. Yeah, that's definitely a movie space station.

Everything about this movie ISS is futuristic, and looks like it was designed by a special effects crew. For example, this control room is very cinematic, and much more advanced than the real thing.

Same goes for these very roomy and design-y sci-fi corridors the crew floats around in.

And then there's this! There is no way in hell the real 2017 ISS features a room full of ALIEN-esque sleeping pods!

And I'm for goddamned sure there's no gigantic window like this one anywhere on the real ISS. Space is full of radiation and cosmic rays, guys. Typically the designers of outer space habitats tend to want to minimize the windows, not build gigantic twenty foot wide viewing walls like this.

• The film begins with what appears to be one continuous five minute long shot. That seems to be the new trend in "realistic" space films like Gravity and The Martian. I'm not really sure why this happens. Is a continuous shot with 360 degree movement supposed to trick our minds into thinking the actors are in a real environment, not a set?

• Speaking of Gravity, the filmmakers are seemingly in love with it almost as much as they are with ALIEN, as there are numerous nods to it as well.

In addition to the continuous opening shot, the ISS astronauts fly around the interior of the weightless station, just like Sandra Bullock did in Gravity. There's also a lengthy space walk sequence in Life that's very reminiscent of the ones in Gravity as well.

And of course Life features a space capsule colliding with the ISS, just like in Gravity. Seriously, it looks like they took footage from Gravity and just spliced it directly into this film! It's shockingly identical.

• I wasn't kidding when I said Life is basically a remake of ALIEN. In addition to lifting the entire plot from that earlier film, it recreates entire scenes, right down to the dialogue and set direction!

For example, early in the film, Hugh locks himself in the lab and examines Calvin. Unfortunately Calvin attacks Hugh, seriously wounding him. When Rory sees this, he immediately tries to open the lab and rescue Hugh. Miranda, the station's Quarantine Officer, forbids it. Rory ignores her and enters the lab anyway, which leads to Calvin's escape.

This entire scene is lifted practically word for word from ALIEN. When Dallas and Lambert bring the injured Kane (who has a face hugger attached to his head) back to the Nostromo, Ripley refuses to let them back in. The crew members argue back and forth for a bit, until Ash overrides Ripley and lets them in.

Later on David's floating through a cramped corridor on the ISS, as the alien Calvin zips past the camera in the foreground. The exact same scene, right down to the blocking, happens in ALIEN, when Dallas is trying to flush the xenomorph from the air ducts.

And at one point one of the crew members is standing in the foreground, as Calvin drops out of an overhead vent, then slowly rises up behind them. Again, this is a precise reenactment of a scene in ALIEN.

About the only thing missing from Life was a pet cat and a crew member who was secretly an android!

• Life was written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, who also wrote Deadpool. It features Ryan Reynolds (well for a little while at least), who was of course the star of Deadpool. 

It should be noted that Reynolds is pretty much playing Deadpool here (minus the facial scars and red suit), as he spends every second of his screen time tossing out quips and sarcastic remarks. 

And by "playing Deadpool" I really mean "playing himself." Reynolds is fast becoming the new Jack Nicholson or Liam Neeson, playing the same character— i.e himself— in every film he's in.

By the way, Reynold's was originally cast as David, the main character (or the closest thing to one in the film). Scheduling conflicts with the upcoming The Hitman's Bodyguard forced him to take the role of Rory instead, so he could bow out of the movie early.

• This is the second time Hiroyuki Sanada plays an astronaut in a sci-fi film. He played Kaneda in 2007's Sunshine.

• Credit where credits's due— there's exactly one clever idea in this film. Hugh, the ISS' resident biologist, is paralyzed from the waist down, and has shriveled little legs just like Jake Sully in Avatar (hey, yet another influence!).

This isn't a problem for Hugh in the weightless environment of outer space though, as he doesn't need legs to float and fly around the station. In fact he's probably more agile than the unafflicted members of the crew. Hugh even comments that he's never felt as free as he does inside the confines of the ISS. Well done, writers!

• Speaking of zero-G, the weightless effects in Life are all very well done, as the actors look like they're effortlessly floating around the station. They even realistically push themselves off of walls and fly from compartment to compartment.

Eh, with one big exception. There's a scene in which the entire cast is gathered around a large table. I dunno why they're all there, as they don't appear to be eating or discussing anything. I guess they're just supposed to be hanging out. 

Anyway, the cast all "floats" as they huddle around this table. Unfortunately it's patently obvious that no one's on wires or anything in this scene, and the director just told them all to bob up and down slightly in a flailing effort to simulate weightlessness (!). It looks about as convincing as you'd imagine something like that would.

• One last thing about weightlessness before I shut up about it. Wondering why all the women in the movie have short hair, or constantly have it pulled back into a bun? Because short and/or restrained hair doesn't move around! If the women all had long, flowing hairstyles, the effects team would have had to simulate it floating in zero-G!

• More credit where it's due— the Calvin effects were all completely realistic and absolutely believable. I'm sure it's not easy creating a convincing translucent CGI creature.

Not so much the case with Calvin's later iteration, which looked very much the wadded-up Kleenexes my mom would always stuff into her sleeve.

The best part of Calvin's alien starfish look was that he had no discernible head or face. This was unsettling and very effective, as you're never quite sure whether he can actually see or is sensing his prey some other way. This lends an eerie, alien quality to Calvin. 

Unfortunately, in the third act Calvin starts to develop a rudimentary head. I can't find any photos of it online, but this head looks at best like an artichoke heart, and at worst like an angry cabbage. They should have left well enough alone.

• Apparently Calvin thrives on oxygen, and craves it so much David can even use it to lure him into an escape pod.

But why? Calvin came from Mars, right? So how much oxygen is there in the thin atmosphere of the Red Planet? According to Google, the answer's 0.1%. That doesn't sound like much. It certainly doesn't sound like enough to cause Calvin to develop a taste for it.

• At one point Hugh comments that Mars is a dead and barren world because a whole herd of Calvins decimated all life there. So were the Calvins native to Mars then? Doubtful, as they'd likely have destroyed any life before it had the chance to evolve. It's more likely that a single Calvin cell hitched a ride on a meteorite that landed on Mars. It then consumed all life there and became dormant when there was nothing left to eat.

• Just how smart is Calvin? Seconds after he escapes from the lab, the ISS' communication system goes down. Obviously the filmmakers want us to believe Calvin sabotaged it, but that seems like a stretch. He's a translucent starfish who's never encountered humanity or our technology before. Could he really figure out the concept of electronic communication and how to disable it in just a few minutes?

• After Rory's killed and Calvin escapes into the ship, Katerina sends out a distress call to Earth. Seemingly just a few hours later, a Soyuz capsule arrives at the station.

Yeah, no. That's scientifically impossible. Real space travel takes lots of time, and depends on all sorts of complicated conditions like launch windows, orbital planes and such. Even if you've got a rocket all furled and ready to go, you can't just blast off into space whenever you feel like it.

• When Hugh goes into cardiac arrest, David uses a futuristic defibrillator on him. Of course the way he uses it is completely wrong, just like every scene involving a defib machine in every movie ever made.

This is an old, old song here at Bob Canada's BlogWorld, but once more with feeling— the human heart is not a car battery, and a defib machine is not a pair of jumper cables! You can't shock a non-beating heart back to life!

Some day before I die, I'd like to see a defibrillator used the right way in a movie.

• I'm VERY impressed that the filmmakers went with such a bleak, downer of an ending. You don't often see that in the cineplex in this day and age.

Although the final scene indicates it's all over for us here on Earth, I wonder if that's really true? Maybe Calvin will be undone by our microbes, ala the Martians in The War Of The Worlds?

Life is well made, well acted and looks incredible, but it's all in service of a derivative, unoriginal script, as it steals the entire plot (and even whole scenes) directly from ALIEN, which drags down the final score by an entire letter grade. It features a welcome and shocking downer of an ending, but one scene does not a good movie make. Do yourself a favor and rewatch ALIEN instead. I give it a C+.