Wow! Life > Alien!
Yup. You heard that right. 2017 is off to a tremendous start! January, February, and March typically combine for the worst quarter of the year for movies. I’ve been reviewing movies since 2010, and each year has confirmed this belief. I didn’t anticipate 2017 feeling differently, but it is slowly happening. First, there was the surprising Split, which I personally wasn’t a fan of, but one that did fantastic with audiences and critics. Then there was Logan, which is one of my five favorite Marvel movies ever at the time of this writing. Sprinkle in the surprise hit Get Out, the quality reboot Kong: Skull Island, the live-action smash success Beauty and the Beast, and you already have five movies that won’t necessarily be up for awards at the end of the year but will be remembered as success stories for 2017. Now add a late March release of Life, the Jake Gyllenhaal/Ryan Reynolds vehicle that has been wowing potential audiences with both extended trailers and television advertisements during some marquee events. And for good reason. The trailer drew my interest, and, barring a complete rejection by the critics, I knew this would be a movie that I saw in the theater. I am actually surprised by the 66% critics score and even more shocked by the 61% audience score. This movie isn’t necessarily a thinker in that you’re going to get confused, but it makes you use your brain to follow along. For this reason, I don’t expect an audience score to be 95%, but I would expect it to be much higher. Perhaps it was a little slow for some people at times. I certainly did not think so. I was hooked from the beginning and thoroughly engrossed the entire 103 minute run time.
The Nines did nothing to convince me that Ryan Reynolds (The Proposal, The Amityville Horror) is the great actor many consider him to be. I’m still waiting on one Ryan Reynolds movie that I enjoy. I’m expecting I will enjoy The Green Lantern, but my enjoyment of this movie might be despite Ryan Reynolds and not because of him. I also suspect I will enjoy 
There were two movies released in 2010 about a single individual trapped in a circumstance that most of us cannot even fathom, much less be able to endure. One of those was the Danny O’Boyle/James Franco Best Picture Academy Award nominee 127 Hours. The other was a much lesser known and slightly lesser received effort by director first-time director Roberto Cortes and Ryan Reynolds (The Proposal, The Amityville Horror) called Buried. It’s hard to to know how Buried would have done if it had been released in any other year. Unfortunately for Cortes and Reynolds, it was released just months before the true story