I took a break from building the Lego monster to visit Rochester cinema and watch the film Life. I rated this film on IMDB and you can see a guide to my ratings within this communication.
I spent a lot of this film wondering what to write. I’m still not sure. One of the ways I interact with films is to consider what I write here. It allows me to collect my thoughts and experience the film as something more than just a cinema trip. I am nearly at the point when I am going to take a pad and pen into a film to note down my thoughts as the film rolls. What is written here is normally a collection of illiterate thoughts after the fact. My musings are filtered through the cold process of entropy increasing. Occasionally I add an extra thought here or there when I realise I’ve missed an important point I wanted to make, hence a note pad would be a good idea. I don’t want to write notes on my phone because that’s likely to get me kicked out or would, at the very least, be quite anti-social in the darkened environment of the cinema.
You know what? I’m still not sure what to write. There are some science issues and orbital mechanics things that annoyed me a little but I don’t think they spoiled the film for me. Overall it was quite a good watch. This was essentially Alien but on the International Space Station. It wasn’t really as suspenseful as Alien, but then I do love Alien and Aliens. I did find this ultimately quite not-frightening.
Right [collects thoughts]. This film was fine. I like space stuff and this film had space stuff. Yep, that’s it. Fine.
Now, some bits a pieces with potential SPOILERS.
The ISS had to “catch” the mars probe? Not going to happen.
The life form was very aggressive, I don’t think this type of life form could exists on a planet. It would have to compete for food and resources and it would use them all very soon. Oh, shit, like humans on Earth. Wow! perhaps I missed that metaphor.
The Martian soil didn’t float about.
They found a single microscopic cell out of all the junk they brought in from the probe.
The Soyuz launched to boost the ISS to “deep space” would not have enough fuel. The film mentioned “deep space” a few times as though it’s easy to get there. It’s not. The energy required is immense. We have never, so far, sent a human to deep space. We haven’t even sent a human out of the Earth’s gravity well. We have sent some probes out beyond Earth’s grip but nothing that could sustain human life. I guess the film was set in the future so maybe they can have that one.
The Soyuz docked at a closing velocity that would have destroyed both machines.
There are probably other issues but I don’t want to come across as petty or pedantic. I am both. This film was largely: fine.
