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Grade: D
Pandorum may sound like a disease suffered by fuzzy black-and-white mammals who’ve been caged a wee bit too long, but the only fuzziness in this apocalyptic nightmare is between the characters’ ears.
Following in the sci-fi tradition of films like Solaris and the monumentally creepy Event Horizon, Pandorum presents a scenario where the line between reality and hallucination is constantly shifting. Set in the 22nd century, when, we are told, Earth has finally had enough of unchecked human proliferation, the movie unfolds aboard the spacecraft Elysium, a kind of Noah’s ark en route to populate a new planet.
Stickily awakened from hyper-sleep, Lieutenant Payton (Dennis Quaid) and Corporal Bower (Ben Foster, all systems clenched) find themselves alone and with only minimal memory. How long have they been in space? Where are they going? Why are their faces frozen in a single expression?
To answer these and other pressing questions, Bower sets off to locate the spaceship’s bridge and is dismayed to find himself the prey of pale, moist-skinned mutants who resemble a cross between the mole people in The Descent and the Reavers in Serenity. While Payton amuses himself by yelling, "Bower, do you copy?," the object of his anxiety is teaming up with a well-padded biologist (Antje Traue) and a well-armed farmer (the mixed-martial-arts world champion Cung Le) and squaring his shoulders to save mankind — or at least its genetic code, languishing in a laboratory as big as the Superdome.
Working from an undercooked screenplay by Travis Milloy, the German director Christian Alvart is an effective manager of atmosphere but an inept choreographer of movement. Fight sequences are shot so closely, so frenetically and with so little light that they’re just a blur of flailing limbs punctuated with flashes of slobbering mutant. Without schematics to show the ship’s layout, neither we nor the characters have any idea where they are in relation to one another. (When the beastie in Alien was headed toward you, you knew it.) So when Bower tumbles into a vast slurry of rotting body parts — perhaps a mass grave, perhaps the mutants’ stock pot — its location is as much a mystery as its ingredients.
Emulating the industrial-goth chic of the Nostromo, Richard Bridgland’s stunning set designs (carefully constructed in a Berlin studio) imagine a clanking womb filled with steam and shadows. Metallic walkways open onto vast, echoing caverns (some scenes were shot in an abandoned power plant), alternately evoking coffinlike claustrophobia and sickening vertigo. According to the press notes, pandorum means "Orbital Dysfunctional Syndrome"; whatever that is, by the end of the movie I was convinced I had caught it.
Pandorum may sound like a disease suffered by fuzzy black-and-white mammals who’ve been caged a wee bit too long, but the only fuzziness in this apocalyptic nightmare is between the characters’ ears.
Following in the sci-fi tradition of films like Solaris and the monumentally creepy Event Horizon, Pandorum presents a scenario where the line between reality and hallucination is constantly shifting. Set in the 22nd century, when, we are told, Earth has finally had enough of unchecked human proliferation, the movie unfolds aboard the spacecraft Elysium, a kind of Noah’s ark en route to populate a new planet.
Stickily awakened from hyper-sleep, Lieutenant Payton (Dennis Quaid) and Corporal Bower (Ben Foster, all systems clenched) find themselves alone and with only minimal memory. How long have they been in space? Where are they going? Why are their faces frozen in a single expression?
To answer these and other pressing questions, Bower sets off to locate the spaceship’s bridge and is dismayed to find himself the prey of pale, moist-skinned mutants who resemble a cross between the mole people in The Descent and the Reavers in Serenity. While Payton amuses himself by yelling, "Bower, do you copy?," the object of his anxiety is teaming up with a well-padded biologist (Antje Traue) and a well-armed farmer (the mixed-martial-arts world champion Cung Le) and squaring his shoulders to save mankind — or at least its genetic code, languishing in a laboratory as big as the Superdome.
Working from an undercooked screenplay by Travis Milloy, the German director Christian Alvart is an effective manager of atmosphere but an inept choreographer of movement. Fight sequences are shot so closely, so frenetically and with so little light that they’re just a blur of flailing limbs punctuated with flashes of slobbering mutant. Without schematics to show the ship’s layout, neither we nor the characters have any idea where they are in relation to one another. (When the beastie in Alien was headed toward you, you knew it.) So when Bower tumbles into a vast slurry of rotting body parts — perhaps a mass grave, perhaps the mutants’ stock pot — its location is as much a mystery as its ingredients.
Emulating the industrial-goth chic of the Nostromo, Richard Bridgland’s stunning set designs (carefully constructed in a Berlin studio) imagine a clanking womb filled with steam and shadows. Metallic walkways open onto vast, echoing caverns (some scenes were shot in an abandoned power plant), alternately evoking coffinlike claustrophobia and sickening vertigo. According to the press notes, pandorum means "Orbital Dysfunctional Syndrome"; whatever that is, by the end of the movie I was convinced I had caught it.
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