Movie Review: Pandorum

It's a B-grade, make that a C-grade ALIEN, without the alien

Two astronauts awaken from hyper-sleep, unable to remember anything. They're disoriented in the dark. Payton [Dennis Quaid] stays behind in a functional hyper-sleep chamber. It's functional in the sense that it's outfitted with a console that can pretty much access most of the ship. Meanwhile Bower, an in-form Ben Foster [3:10 to Yuma, Alpha Dog] ventures into the bowels of the ship on a mission to restore power to the ship and to make sense of everything else.

The name of this flick elicits 'paranoia' and 'pandemonium', and possibly 'Pandora's Box'. It's supposed to be a horror movie, set in space. Certainly some of the themes are horrific. Earth has been destroyed, and one space ship, the Elysium, is floating towards the edge of space, to a planet called Tanis, carrying a massive inventory of life. It's a one way trip.

In theory, survival is crucial so that our species can continue to exist. Problem is, you don't know which main character to back initially, and if you did, you wouldn't be sure why.

Although Pandorum is too confusing to have the suspense of ALIEN it does irk and scare occasionally with jabs of light and loud-noise in the dark. It's disturbing because you can't figure out the puzzle of what's going on for vast fragments of this flick. So what does it deliver?

Early on Bower discovers their spaceship is overrun by, well, orcs. And I guess that is the essence of the film. It's a mixture of 'Event Horizon' and 'Resident Evil', and will probably make a great game platform. If you don't like that, you won't like this flick.

Personally, I love sci-fi, but orcs are a stretch. Give me aliens or a virus, or intergalactic war, but there is something patently inauthentic about humanoid zombie-like creatures. Perhaps we're just too familiar with the sallow-skinned, black blooded, incomprehensible savage. It's that, but the people who come out of the woodwork, one by one, are also savage and almost as unrelatable as the apparently mindless cretins. And are we to believe humans evolved in stasis into creatures unable to talk?

The half-baked screenplay by Travis Milloy is partly to blame. The filmmaker - Christian Alvart - is an amateur when it comes to fight sequences. They are so badly done that I ended up asking myself, mid-movie: "Why is it that movies tend to resolve philosophical questions [who are they? what are they doing here? what is their mission?] with blood, sweat and spears. Why is the amount of reasoning, the strategic, logical approach, such a distant second to the near constant physical brutality?" If you're asking questions like that, you know the movie doesn't hit the spot.

From the New York Times:
Without schematics to show the ship’s layout, neither we nor the characters have any idea where they are in relation to one another. (When the beastie in “Alien” was headed toward you, you knew it.) So when Bower tumbles into a vast slurry of rotting body parts — perhaps a mass grave, perhaps the mutants’ stock pot — its location is as much a mystery as its ingredients.

There are a few positives to report to the bridge. Germany's Lara Croft, Antje Traue as Nadia, is worth a second look.

Richard Bridgland’s set designs are powerfully evocative. The spaceship, from the outside, is something we haven't seen before. The innards, built in Berlin, are Nostromo-ish, but at turns it feels like someone's basement, alternating with a credibly advanced 2174 A.D. console. There's beautiful use - on this apparently high-tech vessel - of wind-up alternatives to powering up everything from weapons, to reactors, to computer consoles. The moments that are authentic are powerful, and well rendered, but too few.

The focus on 'Pandorum'[a sickness associated with being in space too long] is the weakness of the flick. Think about it. Which movie have you seen that renders insanity effectively? Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? A Beautiful Mind? The problem is you have to be very smart, you have to be a gifted story-teller to show the descent into madness, and you have to care about the characters when you see this happening. In 'Pandorum' there is a twist, but it doesn't really reinforce, instead it adds to a sense of opaque overload.

This is a pity, because on paper this flick has a lot going for it. The concept of human beings losing their home planet [or even just their homes], and the importance for survival, are fairly prominent, if subliminal themes in contemporary society. The idea of people forming bands to ward off other violent mobs [us versus them] is also closer to home than we might fully realise. While insanity may be tough to render, being confused about reality is troubling enough, and Alvart could have satisfied himself with pursuing just that, rather than adding 'crazy' to his on-screen palette.

'Pandorum' can't decide whether to be modern or industrial, heroic or horrible, dystopian or enlightening, sane or mad. And what about scary?

It's about as scary as looking at your monthly phone bill. 'Pandorum' says a lot about our current troubled confusion towards the world, the claustrophobia and unreality of reality, where the walls move in and the substrate on which we live is decaying life. These are important issues, but unfortunately 'Pandorum' isn't easy to watch. It's a B-grade, make that a C-grade ALIEN, without the alien. It's just too much muddling about in the dark.

Score: 7/10