Pandormonium

Can PANDORUM match the classic psychological space thrillers by adding in extra elements?

Release date: 2 October 2009
Directed by: Christian Alvert
Produced by: Jeremy Bolt, Robert Kulzer
Starring: Dennis Quaid, Ben Foster, Cam Gigandet, Antje Traue
Cert: 16

If you go to padorum expecting a movie about a forum dedicated to pandas you will be disappointed. Here, Pandorum is a mental condition that causes sufferers to have paranoid delusions with drastic consequences.

Pandorum starts in the style of Star Wars, with a couple of bars of text to contextualise what you are about to watch. This movie is set post 2174, which is around the time humans use up the last of earth’s natural resources. We are then beamed aboard a big space ship. Then we get a quick clip of the captain on deck being told “you’re all that’s left of us”. Then Cpl. Bower (Ben Foster) wakes up from “hyper sleep” (is that not an oxymoron?) and then we start with the slow build up of tension. Nobody else seems to be awake and all Bower can remember is that his Lueitenant’s name is Payton. Apparently, hyper sleep gives you temporary amnesia.

Soon afterward Payton (Dennis Quaid) rouses from his hyperslumber and the party can begin. There’s nobody else around and a for twenty minutes we get a barage of questions; where are we? Where’s the crew? How come there’s no electricity? Etc. The inevitable conclusion they come to is Bower should go climbing trough the air vents while Payton stays where he is, with only a tempermental comm system to keep them in touch.

Then it is decided that Bower should go fix a generator. On his way there he encounters a number of survivours of whatever it is that has happened that has lead to the ship being fairly deserted. Some of them join him in the stye of a Shrek flick. Others get eaten by hideous space monsters. Meanwhile Payton stays where he is by himself until Gallo (Cam Gigandet of Never Back Down fame) turns up and the they have a debate on how to handle the situation.

Hollywood pictures need to have a love interest, and this one doesn’t (or does depending on your perspective) dissapoint. Bower is trying to find where is wife is having a hypernap and he keeps having visions of her. This doesn’t do much for the story and feels very tacked on.

This tacked on feeling rears its head a few times. The script seems a couple of drafts short of where it wants to be. The conversation where the condition of pandorum is explained, for example, shows little effort. Payton asks Bower does he know what it is, then Bower gives a basic explaination, then Payton tops it off with a bit more detail. Lazy.

Not enough time went into the design of the alien space mutants either. They just look like skinheads from Sligo at a Mad Max convention. Predator came two decades ago. Alien came out three decades ago and the aliens from those two make these jokers look very amateurish.

It’s not as though the makers of this film haven’t seen Alien. There’s much here that existed in the 1979 predecessor. Crawling through small spaces, distant noises, very little light, things jumping out all over the place. These elements are encorporated well and moved on slightly with the who dunnit factor of the pandorum condition, but not enough to shake the feeling that you’ve been here before.

In the end, too many elements get thrown at the story in an attempt to make it feel new. It leads to too many twists in the last 20 minutes and you get left feeling dizzy.

A failure to boldly go where no sci-fi thriller flick has gone before prevents this one from goin anywhere near supernova.