Pandorum

You could easily chalk this movie up to one I would have never seen if I did not see it for free. It looked like such a generic Resident Evil/Event Horizon rip off and neither Resident Evil or Event Horizon are very good movies, in my opinion. Being produced by the guys who brought us Resident Evil did not help matters. The movie did have one very good thing going for it: Ben Foster. If you do not know who he is, do yourself a favor and rent 3:10 to Yuma and Hostage. Dude plays crazy as an art form and from the trailer, he was going to do some of his crazy all over this film.

The year is something like 2174 or some time in the very far future. Resources on Earth have run out and it is time to find a new place to live. They find a planet they call Tanis and plan to inhabit it. The story picks up with Officer Bower(Foster) waking up after a Han Solo style frozen nap. He has no recollection of who or where he is. He is on a space ship of some sort and he knows a lot about it, and it is obvious he is an officer of something. Next, Commander Payton(Dennis Quaid) wakes up and he is the captain of the ship. They do not have any clue as to what is going on because the flight team that came before them was supposed to be there when they woke up to walk them through the details, but they can find no one on board. Bower heads out into the meat of the ship to try and turn the power back on. However, they are not alone on the ship. First Bower encounters a sexy Russian action chick, then he meets some weird creatures of immense speed, high pitch screams and a hunger for human flesh. Then, there is the Asian ninja and finally an old crazy black man. Bower, the Russian, the Asian and the Black Man are racing against these creatures to get power on the ship, while Payton deals with another survivor slowly going crazy.

For the first 40-50 minutes, Pandorum is a thrilling, claustrophobic, loud, creepy and interesting movie. There were moments when my heart was genuinely racing and I got excited and prepared for a thrill ride. The contrast of light and dark and quiet and loud are so effective, there is never a comforting moment. It gave me great hope that this movie would turn out to be awesome. Foster and Quaid have a nice chemistry as they try and figure out what the hell is going on. The early flashbacks added something to the story, but were vague enough to remain interesting and the fact that they were caked in light made me think that the past and the present were completely separate from each other. In a scene where Foster is crawling through ducts and panicking like crazy, I felt I was in the ducts thanks to great, close up camera shots and just the ambient sound of breathing.

Then, it all goes completely, horrifically wrong. You can tell where it goes wrong too, because the Asian Ninja appears and he fights the Russian Action Chick. Then they all join forces and nonsense ensues. The ship they are on is like a Noah's Arc, but we never see any of the animals, really. Oh and because we have to know what is going on, the movie provides us a crazy person who may not be crazy at all because he knows what is going on, so we get to pause for exposition city. However, we get exposition from two different people and the director wants it to be more exciting so he keeps jumping from 1 to the other. Very exciting, indeed!

Pandorum refers to a cabin fever style of craziness brought on by the Han Solo freezing, maybe. There is a flashback to another ship that shows that Pandorum causes someone to lose control and kill everyone. Payton believes the young man he finds starts showing signs of Pandorum, but Payton himself may be experiencing pandorum, but at this point, I stopped caring.

The creatures are fairly generic zombie looking creatures, except the baby looks like a creepy albino bat. They are loud menacing creatures, but when the movie starts to show them more and give them more to do, I lost interest. Creatures like that are better in the outskirts of a story. Of course, Pandorum is a split personality movie. It feels two stories slammed into one. And then the final 25 minutes could possibly have negated a Major part of the story, leaving the viewer with the impression that the creatures were not real. However, if they were not real, what killed the Asian Ninja? Also, there is no explanation for how the creatures came to be, which is not really a problem for me, but I am sure it would bug others.

When Pandorum ended, I was disappointed. The first third of the movie had really set me up to enjoy it and then it spun out of control, with no one there to correct it. Foster doe snot get to do his crazy stuff enough and the Russian Action Chick was not sexy for long enough to make an impression and what is the point of a Russian Action Chick if she is not sexy? There are 2 or 3 twists that might keep people interested, but I called 1 of them and the other, while kind of a shock, came too late to matter for me. Considering I would have never seen the movie, I cannot say it was horrible because in order for me to come out disappointed, it had to build up some good will and it did, it just ran out before the movie ended.

Final Grade: C-