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. 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. For proof, go see Life this weekend. 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.