Tags : Pandorum review
Movie Review: Pandorum ( *1/2)
This screecher of a creature feature is a reacher. And its reach exceeds its grasp. By plenty.
Pandorum is a science fiction horror thriller set in the year 2174. All that’s left on our ravaged Earth has been placed in the space probe Elysium, which is headed for the distant Tanis, an Earth-like planet where life can perhaps be maintained, given that there’s at least oxygen, water, and plant life.
Dennis Quaid and Ben Foster play Lt. Payton and Corporal Bower, respectively, astronauts who wake up from their cryogenic sleep tanks in a hyper-sleep chamber aboard the ship, which has apparently been abandoned.
Apparently.
So they’re drifting through space, it’s pitch black (recalling the Vin Diesel vehicle, Pitch Black), and neither Payton nor Bower can remember a thing: not who they are or why they’re here or where everybody else is.
They begin to piece the puzzle together and figure out what the heck’s going on: their mission is to colonize Tanis, but they’ve veered off course. They also begin to feel an overwhelming paranoia, a variation of what might be called stir craziness or space madness, the condition that lends the film its title.
There’s only one way to the spacecraft’s control room, a dark, narrow airshaft, which Bower crawls through in the hopes of eventually getting the ship back on course. Payton remains behind so he can guide him on a radio transmitter.
What they come to learn is that they are not exactly alone. Not only are there other crew members aboard, but the ship is overrun with flesh-eating mutants that are imposingly fast, strong, and loud. And hungry. Oh, and they know kung fu (a rather silly concept that renders the film in one unforgettably strange scene Kung Fu Pandorum).
Payton and Bower also learn that it’s not only their survival that’s threatened, but that of the human race. If they can’t get the wayward ship back on course, the species is doomed.
German director Christian Alvart (Antibodies, Case 39) — making his English-language debut by working from a muddled and confusing story he co-wrote with the screenwriter, Travis Milloy — owes an obvious debt to Ridley Scott’s classic chiller, Alien, the memory of which makes his pale imitation of a classic seem even worse.
The makers and shapers of Pandorum apparently also think of this as a film of ideas. Hmmm. Well, if so, they’re half-baked at best.
The mild feelings of dread and claustrophobia generated by the early reels are, as so often happens in supposedly scary thrillers, just about completely squandered once what’s to be feared is rendered explicit. The anticipation we feel early on is much more gratifying then the eventual payoff that we resent the movie for leading us on. The result: it flat-out loses us.
And no amount of atmospheric low-key lighting, jittery camerawork, or rapid-fire editing can bring us back. All that can do is give us a collective headache and make us feel we’re dining in a restaurant the staff of which doesn’t want us to see what we’re about to consume.
Perhaps more to the point, the monsters on display aren’t nearly as creepy or terrifying as they’re intended to be anyway.
Pandorum is a derivative and barely disquieting doomsday chiller. But as annoyingly fragmented cannibalistic-zombies-in-space chillers go, it’s still a mess.
Bill Wine – Celebrity News Service Movie Critic/ AHN
108 minutes
In theaters September 25, 2009
Rating: R, Science fiction thriller
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