Life

After several weeks of limited movement, a handful of new releases prompted a pretty thorough shakeup of the Box Office Top 10. While Beauty and the Beast continued its unstoppable assault on the domestic box office, we also said hello this weekend to three new movies and goodbye to a handful of old favorites from the first few months of the year. Let’s start with the estimated numbers as of Sunday afternoon.

While Life may sometimes seem like a loving collaboration of used parts  —  a dash of Alien, a dollop of Gravity, a pinch of every ’90s monster movie your parents still have on VHS in their attic  —  there is one element of the movie that is Life and Life’s alone: that ending. If you haven’t seen the film yet, now would be a good time to stop reading, because we’re going to get into the nuts and bolts of what made that Life ending work.

After a daring and dangerous rescue mission, the crew of the International Space Station recovers soil samples that contain the first incontrovertible proof of that alien life exists. They nurture the sample, a single living cell, until it grows into an adorable amorphous blob. The whole world is obsessed with their discovery. A little girl names it Calvin during a worldwide live broadcast from Times Square. The crew is smitten with their new passenger.

The newest trailer for sci-fi horror film Life is probably its best yet. We already know the basic plot, thanks to the other trailers that have been released (scientists on a space station find a living organism floating through the void that turns out to be a not-so-friendly extraterrestrial monster), so this trailer can be as short and sweet as it wants, while giving us some more of that squicky human hand vs. gross alien tentacle action. Spoiler alert: the hand loses.

Life is full of crazy coincidences. But in Life, nothing is coincidental.

SXSW 2017 has officially found its closing night film, and with the addition of the upcoming sci-fi thriller Life, this year’s Film program has a proper beginning, middle and end. The new film, starring Ryan Reynolds, Jake Gyllenhaal and Rebecca Ferguson, will debut in Austin next month to formally conclude the fest (which actually keeps going for a few more days, if you have enough energy to stick around), with all three stars present for the big premiere.

I totally understand why some people may be a little skeptical about Life. Despite the excellent cast, the basic premise is enough to make folks wonder if the film is nothing more than a cheap knock-off of some of its high-profile predecessors. Part of that is the challenge of working within an established genre, I guess. If you’re going to tell a story about dangerous confinement and uneasy alliances, you’re bound to bump up against at least a few movie cliches. That’s not to say that Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence won’t do a good job in the movie, only to suggest that both men are…

Here’s something I’ve never been able to fully understand about myself: I find haunted house movies terribly boring and haunted space station movies absolutely terrifying. Take your typical spooky movie  —  with old buildings, dark hallways, and moving shadows  —  and I could fall asleep right there in the theater. But kick that spooky movie up into space and give the characters some space suits? As far as I’m concerned, that makes anything an instant classic — and I’ve got the Event Horizon ticket stubs to prove it.

In the annals of pop culture, encounters between humankind and our intergalactic neighbors have not gone well. Either the extraterrestrials arrive armed to the teeth and immediately get to work vaporizing everyone in sight — your War of the Worlds model — or homo sapiens play the aggressor and fly into a violent frenzy of premature retribution, only to discover too late that the aliens have come in peace — think The Day the Earth Stood Still. Today brings a first look at yet another film about what life forms await curious space explorers, and true to form, even the single-cell organisms know enough to try to exterminate humanity.

It took a few tries, but Ryan Reynolds finally delivered a good superhero blockbuster with Deadpool, and to celebrate, the actor is eyeing a reunion with the writers behind his box office record-breaking solo outing. Reynolds is in talks to star in the upcoming sci-fi film Life, which boasts the bonus feature of working opposite Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation breakout Rebecca Ferguson.