Firmly in the footsteps of space-horrors Event Horizon and Sunshine, Pandorum follows the story of a man called Bower having woken from a long statis aboard the massive space hulk “Elysium”. The character Bower is played by Ben Foster of X-Men: The Last Stand fame, but whose acting skills were put to much better use as the horribly efficient Charlie Prince in the 3:10 to Yuma remake starring Christian Bale and Russell Crowe. In this he plays an adequate lead in a role where only fragments of Bower’s past are evident to him at the outset. This is an effect of “Pandorum” – a psychological condition caused by extended stasis and space travel, the symptoms of which include paranoia, madness, violence and extreme hallucinations.
Bower soon finds another man called Payton (Dennis Quaid), who has also just awoken from deed sleep and finds himself equally disorientated. Bower looks to reboot the ship’s vital systems and reach other areas as Payton guides him from the relative safety of ship’s control room, but Bower soon loses contact when he comes across some horribly mutated on-board hostiles.
The mutants are a sort of cross between the Reavers in Firefly/Serenity and the creatures from The Descent. Not just for their look but for the crude weapons that they weild. As they close in on Bower he finds himself a stun-gun, the meatiest weapon we see in the entire movie (which is actually kind of cool, and boosts the ’survival’/grab-whatever-one-can element).
As time goes on we discover (along with the characters, who are only just remembering), that the space ship Elysium is a ’sleeper’ ship on a one-way ride to a planet named Tanis. Tanis is a world much like our own which will sustain life following Earth’s massive overpopulation. To go on explaining would be to ruin the story.
Watch the Pandorum trailer:
I think the movie would have benefited from more believable and varied characters, for example the idealised girl Nadia who saves Bower early on and has learnt martial arts in five months, no mean feat provided we are to believe that before she was just a worker in the ship’s bio lab. It isn’t difficult to recognise the people involved with the Resident Evil flicks helped make this, the whole Nadia and the random Asian martial arts god (don’t ask) who turn up reek of Resi’s Alice and numerous other slightly one-dimensional heroines from the last ten or so years of cinema.
According to the FAQ on IMDB, Pandorum is the first part of a planned trilogy, and though critics attacked it pretty badly the general public seem to have enjoyed it quite a bit more. I think it is in danger of becoming another so-so Resident Evil/Chronicles of Riddick-esque franchise. Pandorum isn’t a great movie, but provides us with a decent and entertaining space-horror. For all its faults there are some decent plot ideas and If executed with a steady hand, there could yet be room for an interesting sequel.
If you like the sound of Pandorum, you may also like the movies:
Event Horizon (1997)
Sunshine (2007)
Serenity (2005)
Firefly (2002)
Pitch Black (2000)
The Descent (2005)
Or if you’re into computer games:
Dead Space (2008)
Some related posts:
the Perfect spacecraft
Here’s my post ‘The Top Villains of the ’00s’ in which Ben Foster and The Operative from Serenity feature
Danny Boyle: filmography to date
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