The hamster never stood a chance. And neither do the actors in Life, a so-so space-station suspenser with heavy actors and a zero-gravity script. Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, Ryan Reynolds and others float around one another for an intense but spark-free 103 minutes, their characters barely sketched.
Gyllenhaal is a doctor who doesn't want to return to Earth, because … well, because Syria. Ariyon Bakare is a paraplegic biologist who loves the space life, where he's not constrained to a wheelchair. Reynolds is the wisecracker. At first, a microscopic organism retrieved from Mars is a sort of pet to the scientist-astronauts and a celebrity in the eyes of those watching it on the Times Square big screen. They dub it Calvin. But soon, the crafty starfish-ian thing is a threat not only to the space station but to Earth itself.
Slotting somewhere between Alien and The Blob, the film has solid horror but little more. The ending is B-movie cheesy. Life is what you make of it. Good luck with that.