7 Movie Plots That Could Have Been Resolved In Five Minutes

The Plot: In Life, a group of astronauts recover a soil sample from Mars that contains signs of alien... life. A crew member begins to nurture and play with a cell they recover from the sample, and this eventually grows into a creature that's all brain, all muscle, and all evil.

This creature - Calvin - quickly turns violent, crushing someone's hand and escaping its small enclosure, floating freely throughout the lab. From here, another crew member enters the lab and attacks Calvin with a flamethrower, but this does nothing, and Calvin kills him before escaping the lab through a vent which had opened automatically when it detected fire.

With the alien now roaming the ship, it kills several of the crew, and by the end of the movie, ends up on Earth, where it could quite possibly wipe out the entirety of mankind.

How It Could've Been Resolved Quickly: Life is a movie that's full of dumb decisions, but the sequence of events that led to Calvin's initial escape just boggles the mind.

Playing with the creature and prodding it with an electric rod, entering the lab after it escaped its enclosure, and using a damn flamethrower in an enclosed room are all things that qualified, experienced NASA astronauts would know they shouldn't do, under any circumstances.

NASA has guidelines for situations like this, which state that all lifeforms should be treated as hazardous until proven otherwise (so giving it electric shocks probably isn't the best idea), and that astronauts should err on the side of caution at all times - potentially burning down the space station is not being cautious.

Had the crew acted smartly, Calvin might never have become dormant in the first place, and even if he did, they should have just left him alone in containment. This way, they all live, and the alien doesn't escape down to Earth.