Enough with the Unoriginal Sci-fi. Looking at You, Life

Science fiction cinema has a longstanding problem: Good ideas abound, but great ones are in short supply. (And most of the good ones have been used.) After decades of drought, 2001: A Space Odyssey spawned Solaris and Star Wars and Alien, and the genre became popular, but pulpily so; parades of familiar tropes spackled over with terrible visual effects. Now, in the age of mindbending and somehow relatively affordable CGI, there’s almost always a sci-fi movie in wide release. Yet somehow, more often than not, it’s boring. Or a mess. Or, worst of all, a boring mess.

For proof, go see Life this weekend. (Seriously. It’s not good, but a couple of years ago we told you to support original sci-fi by buying tickets to Jupiter Ascending, and we’re not going to back down now.) While you’re watching Ryan Reynolds and Jake Gyllenhaal gamely trying to hunk up Life‘s Alien-lite premise and predictable twist ending, your mind will wander—and at some point you’ll wonder when big space movies became such an unrelenting snooze. The answer to that, unfortunately, is when Hollywood started making sci-fi for everyone.

Before you race into the comments to push your glasses up your nose, understand that this isn’t a complaint about science fiction being popular. That’s good news for everyone. (Nor are we casting aspersions at pre-existing franchises that have Star in the title, or brainy adaptations like Arrival.) But as the genre blasted into the mainstream, studios began treating them as investments—and expecting a return on that investment in the form of huge opening weekends and international appeal. The bigger the investment, the riskier the return, which means that a pipeline full of movies that mimic other hits, and star bankable actors. Call it the Gravity Effect. Once Sandra Bullock and George Clooney and some jawdropping effects wizardry entered the picture, space-based sci-fi officially became a tentpole event.

The peak—and, let’s face it, valley—of that trend was last winter’s Passengers. Aside from being a two-hour explanation of what consent isn’t, it’s also a big beautiful movie about two uncommonly fit folks falling in love while also being the only ones conscious on a decades-long journey to a new colony. In other words, it’s Lost in Space with two hot people instead of a family—or maybe Cast Away on an intergalactic shopping center where the part of the volleyball is played by Jennifer Lawrence. Luckily for Passengers, its leads were charismatic, and it ended up making nearly $300 million worldwide. The space + hotties = $$$ formula worked, but to anyone with even a passing familiarity of sci-fi, the horror of being stranded in space was well-trod ground.

Meanwhile, a generational changing of the guard began to happen. When studios launched giant franchises, they increasingly tapped the filmmakers who had grown up on Spielberg and Ridley Scott—and last decade’s wealth of mid-budget sci-fi began to dry up. Duncan Jones went from modest but inventive movies like Moon and Source Code to Warcraft; Rian Johnson made Looper, and now is directing Star War: The Last Jedi.

That leaves two categories in which sci-fi is actually likely to succeed: existing franchises, and literary adaptations, which have the benefit of a story that was—hope you’re sitting down—fully developed before it got greenlit by a studio! That’s how you got 2014’s Edge of Tomorrow. That’s how you got The Martian, which managed to tap the “stranded in space” vein without feeling like it had been extruded from the Sure-Fire Factory. It’s how you got Arrival, which paired a promising young director (Sicario‘s Denis Villeneuve) with an emotionally rich short story (Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life.”).

That’s not how you got Life. Life, like Passengers, is a movie about Familiar Ideas, starring People We Like to Look At. The movie follows a crew on the International Space Station that takes a sample from Mars, brings it back to life, and then lives in fear as the sample turns into an alien that looks like a translucent starfish and threatens to pick them off, one by one. (Also, the alien is named Calvin. In case that matters.) In other words, it’s mostly Alien (the creators have copped to this), with a little Martian and Gravity. It wants to have some Event Horizon, but it’s not that terrifying. It’s not that Life is dead, it’s just doesn’t have any fresh blood. It’ll likely make some money from people who have already seen Beauty and the Beast and can’t bring themselves to see CHIPS, but they will all know what they’re in for from beginning to end.

This is actually evident before the title card even appears on screen. As scientist Hugh Derry (Ariyon Bakare) attempts to bring his martian specimen to life, Roy Adams (Reynolds) cracks wise: “This is some Re-Animator shit.”

“That’s an obscure reference,” says his colleague Rebecca North (Rebecca Ferguson).

“Not if you’re a nerd,” Roy and Derry respond immediately.

The thing is, everyone in the audience got the reference. They got it before the scene singled out the woman as the non-nerd in the room. It, like the rest of the movie, recalled some cool shit from yesteryear. And it was kind of funny. But the fact that it got explained implies that someone making Life thought people wouldn’t know its predecessors. That’s a terrible set up—and an even worse punchline.