Pandorum

Super Marcey's Pandorum Review

Rating: 2.5/5

Pandorum is a film which borrows  heavily from other sci-fi films, chances are you have seen this film  before and then some. In a nicely done opening we find ourselves on a  ship in the future, it appears to be empty. Our main character Bower  (Ben Foster) is awakened from suspended animation, and has no idea what  is going on. Soon Payton (Dennis Quaid) is also awakened, and the pair  try to work out what is going on. To make matters worse, there appears  to be things not working, no communication with the bridge and some  weird creatures on board who want to eat human flesh.

For me Pandorum was a mixed bag, there  were things I liked about it and things I didn’t like. I felt  performance wise Ben Foster was great, but he always is. He was a real  pleasure to watch and get behind with this film. I liked Dennis Quaid, I  thought he was much better here than in Legion which was a nice change.  I didn’t really feel anything towards any of the other characters, but I  did think that Cam Gigandet (You’d remember him from Twilight no doubt)  did a great job as Gallo in the small role that he had. I thought that  the scenes he had with Dennis Quaid were well done and they had this  great back and forth chemistry.

The pacing of this film was really off,  it moved at a good rate at some spots and then slowed down and got a  bit boring in others. It really wasn’t solid and I did lost interest  because of that at times. The actual atmosphere aboard this ship was  great, it had that feel that you really didn’t want to be there and  something was really off. The creatures were pretty ugly, but for me  they didn’t really add anything to the story and I think it would have  worked without them actually. There was so much more they could have  done but ultimately they went the cliched route and it hurt the film.

I did think that the ending was well  done, and it was a nice twist even though I did figure out a few things,  other things were quite surprising and it worked. Visually, the ending  looked great too, the cinematography was quite good. The color and the  lack of a lot of light did set the mood. It was a mixed bag, and I was  really hoping that this would have been a great sci-fi horror entry, but  it is average.


(Written on May 18th 2010, first published at SuperMarcey.com)

Recommendations: Moon (Duncan Jones, 2009), Milk, Hurt Locker, The (Kathryn Bigelow, 2009)

Last updated: 2010-05-19 01:12:28 by SuperMarcey

Pandorum

Pandorum - Directed by Christian Alvart, starring Ben Foster, Dennis Quaid, and Antje Traue - Rated R

If you've been reading my reviews at all, then you know I have a soft spot for sci-fi, which is why I'm willing to forgive Pandorum its few transgressions (too dark early in the film, creatures seem like rip offs of the Reavers from "Firefly"/Serenity, etc.) and recommend it as a totally decent horror sci-fi film. It helps that it stars Ben Foster, who is quickly becoming one of my favorite actors and is hardcore sci-fi. By that I mean that it takes place hundreds of years in the future and the entire movie takes place on a spaceship. The action isn't half bad, either. A little frenetic at times, but it does have an interesting look to it. If any of the above sounds good, do yourself a favor and give it a rent.

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Eric Harris - www.canneltoncritic.com

Pandorum

2009 was a great year for science fiction movies. In addition to James Cameron's all-conquering Avatar, we were treated to District 9's Oscar-nominated vision of an alien-infested South Africa, as well as being shown that conceptual sci-fi wasn't dead by the overtly cerebral Moon. It's hard to think of a recent year that has contained three such unexpected science fiction gems.

Unfortunately it wasn't such a good year for Dennis Quaid, and he carries his run of bad form over into writer-director Christian Alvart's Pandorum. From the Se7en-lite rip-off Horsemen to the puerile nonsense of G.I. Joe, 2009 wasn't a vintage year for the Quaid household.

And Pandorum might just be the worst of the bunch.

That's not to say that it's entirely disposable, as it does open with a handful of interesting premises. The Earth has grown so overpopulated that mankind is perpetually at war with itself, until they finally uncover a bright future on the horizon - or just over it. A deep space probe discovers the planet Tanis, a near-perfect match to Earth's atmosphere that has the potential to support human life.

As things go from bad, to worse, to armageddon on Earth, the deep space ship Elysium is sent out with a human cargo to populate the new world, and save mankind from extinction. The voyage will take a total of 123 years, so the thousands of passengers are put into suspended animation for the duration. Only the rotating shifts of flight crew members are supposed to awake during the voyage, to keep the ship on its course.

So far, so intriguing. Many of these ideas are already sci-fi staples, but at least we're given an interesting starting point for the story to launch from.

And yet it barely even gets off the ground. When ship technician Corporal Bower (Ben Foster, most recently seen in 3.10 To Yuma) is awakened from hibernation it appears that it's his time to take over the flight shift. There's no outgoing shift to greet him from his sleep, however - just Lieutenant Payton (Quaid), another awakening flight crew member who seems to be just as confused as Bower.

The mystery deepens when they discover that the door to the bridge is jammed shut, and the power is undergoing dangerous fluctuations. When Bower manages to wriggle out into the body of the ship via the ventilation system he also uncovers a handful of almost feral humans fighting for their lives - and a thriving society of snarling, flesh-eating space zombies that would put the Resident Evil franchise to shame.

From here onwards the narrative starts to fall apart, descending into brainless zombie cliches and cheesy dialogue with worrying ease. There is one half-surprising twist saved for the final few minutes, but by then most of our goodwill has been sucked out into the vacuum of space - and the plot writes itself into such a corner that the ending can't help coming across as a moment of deep space porn, with all the emotional resonance of a Rush album cover.

The more generous among you may be prepared to forgive Dennis Quaid for making the decision to star in this below-par zombie-Alien hybrid, especially given the small amount of time he spends on the screen, but it's hard to be so forgiving of the film as a whole. It takes its intriguing raw materials and spins them into little more than a frustratingly frenetic B-movie in space. Even the effects look cheap, and the final sequence is so 2-D it's hard to believe it was released in the same year as Avatar's visual fireworks.

Still, you will see Dennis Quaid deliver the line "I'm gonna carve you up" - and that's not something you hear him say every day.

2/5

Pandorum

Starring: Dennis Quaid, Ben Foster
Suspense Thriller, 2009 (Rated R)

Two astronauts awaken after an extended slumber on a space ship to a nightmare of killer mutated creatures and more questions then answers as they try to recover their memories and piece together what happened to derail their journey to a newly discovered planet called Tana. They encounter other survivors and attempt to keep the ship from shutting down so that they can continue onto their destination.

• I remained interested as the movie went on and more and more questions were answered about who they were and why they were there.
• Overall decent movie but it didn't knock my socks off in any way.

3 STARS

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Just Me

Pandorum: Movie Review

Without a doubt, a lot of people remember "Aliens" - who could ever forget that feeling of hyper claustrophobia that a dark ship in space brings? The medium has been used several times and certainly, quite a few proved to be successful with this attempt. "Pandorum" excites us as it looks like it has huge potential to actually not be a stinker. It also has been a long time already since we watched a sci-fi flick with monsters on the loose. See if "Pandorum" sucked or not, after the jump.

The movie starts off with Payton (Dennis Quaid) and Bower (Ben Foster), both waking up from their hyper-sleep inside the space ship Elysium. Elysium was launched years ago, carrying thousands and out to reach a planet similar to Earth that can be inhabited by humans. Both guys have amnesia, and they find their ship out of power and without the crew. What happened, what year is it and where are the others? Things start to get more confusing and terrifying as they realize that monsters rule the ship. They now have to work together in order to find out what went wrong, and to get the ship up and running again. Along the way, they find themselves in the company of other humans who’ve been fighting the monsters for a long time.

"Pandorum" couldn’t help but feel that it wasn’t able to reach its full potential. The experience is indeed suspenseful with the very dark and tight ship. Another accolade for the film is probably its unique storyline and surprise twist regarding the ship's fate feels like a mish-mash of storylines and sci-fi flicks. We wanted more from it and by the end of the movie, what leaves a satisfying feeling. But these positive things cannot solely save this film. The experience was really ruined by plot holes and continuity problems between scenes. Most of the time, you will be second-guessing why or what is actually happening on screen. There are less reveals and more questions being thrown at the viewer. Like the actual state of Pandorum wherein one loses his mind, the same thing can be said about the movie. "Pandorum" is indeed lost - completely lost in itself.

Rating: 2 reels

Why you should watch it:
- Darkness and the tight ship will leave you feeling scared most of the time
- The plot is unique in its own right and the ending will surprise you for sure

Why you shouldn't watch it:
- Huge continuity problems seem to plague the movie
- Felt like a mish-mash of storylines and other sci-fi films

Recommendations:

Last updated: 2010-03-12 03:29:04 by user06

Pandorum

I feel so conflicted.

There's a lot that works in "Pandorum." Starting with the premise: an officer on a vast spaceship wakes from a state of suspended animation to find himself completely alone. No one else is awake on the darkened, dilapidated ship -- except for some flesh-eating monsters that may or may not be the other members of the crew.

Wow.

Who doesn't want to see that movie?

But there's stuff that doesn't work.

None of it manifests itself until about the forty-five minute mark, so it's heartbreaking to see the movie, which generates so much good will in those first forty-five minutes, slowly but inexorably unravel into threads.

Let's start with the first good forty-five minutes:

Ben Foster's Corporal Bower comes out of hypersleep. He doesn't remember who or where he is. 

Temporary amnesia is a symptom of extended hypersleep and a fabulous dramatic device. After a bit of searching, he wakes up the only other frozen crewmember he can find: our boy Dennis Quaid.


Quaid plays Lieutenant Payton, and he can't remember much either. Together the two officers try to escape the locked compartment they are in. This involves sending Bower through the air ducts while Quaid directs him by radio.

After much creeping around in the spooky ship, Bower encounters this fetching mystery woman:


She doesn't want anything to do with Bower. She just wants to keep moving because, as it turns out, there are monsters all over the ship. The monsters are disappointingly derivative of the subterranean creatures in Neil Marshall's excellent "Descent," but hey, they're monsters. On a spaceship. I'm still pretty happy.

Then Bower runs into Cung Le, a mixed martial arts fighter who plays Manh, another lone mystery person running around the ship. Manh doesn't speak any English so he isn't able to shed much light on what's going on.


If things are starting to feel complicated, we are just getting started.

Because the ship's reactor is soon to explode, there's the matter of Bower's missing wife, and I haven't even mentioned pandorum itself, which is not the name of the ship we are on (that's the Elysium), but a psychological phenomenon which afflicts travelers in deep space.

All this explains why "Pandorum" eventually turns south.

A good story should get more complicated till about the halfway mark, at which point it should get less complicated till, at the climax, every question has been resolved but the final one: will the protagonist defeat the antagonist or not?

"Pandorum" continues to get complicated right to the end, where it reaches a rolling climax -- lots of struggles in lots of different areas of the ship -- because it doesn't really know what, as a story, it is about.

So why would the German Film Fund spend forty million dollars on a story that doesn't know what it's about? (I'm exaggerating: the Germans didn't foot the entire forty million dollar budget, just a substantial portion of it.)

The answer is: it's hard for a story to know what it's about. In some ways, it's the HARDEST challenge a screenwriter faces. Complexity and contrivance are easy. Just keep adding cool ideas, then find a tortured way for those ideas to connect.

Simplicity, on the other hand, means taking perfectly good ideas and throwing them away because they don't fit.

Hard.

So...

...while I hate to say this about a movie that tracks people crawling around a derelict spaceship...

..."Pandorum" is a near-miss.

Damn it all!

SCORE:

How Accomplished: 46/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 54/100

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Pandorum is an Amazingly Original and Mesmerizing

Pandorum is an amazingly original and crafty sci-fi/horror film. The premise is well thought out and the script delivers bang on from the opening scene to the end. This movie grabs you like a vice right from the start, and never releases until the final credits. The mise-en-scene is beautifully dark and realistic, against the juxtaposition of human beings waking up in a ship without memories of who they are or their mission. The audience explores with the two crew members unraveling the mystery. There are many twists in this film and it's hard to find words without spoiling…so just go see it…you won't be disappointed.

In my opinion, this is the best sci-fi/horror film to hit the major screens since Alien. I viewed Pandorum on Friday, and then Surrogates on Saturday, and without question, Pandorum is a superior film. Pandorum has it all, from dark scenes, fast moving monsters, isolation…it's all there and more. In fact, I haven't felt this much realistic isolation and since Carpenter's 'The Thing'. Yes, I loved this movie! It's definitely one you want to see plastered on the big screen.

Vincent Snavely