Review: Pandorum

I had high expectations for Pandorum. It looked like a mix of Alien, Aliens and the 1997 Sam Neill bomb Event Horizon (which I quite enjoyed despite all its flaws). Unfortunately it was more like Sharon Stone’s bomb Sphere (which I believe more people hated than Event Horizon) or one of the Resident Evil adaptations. It never really pulled me in and, needless to say, was a real letdown.

When Earth becomes overpopulated in the future, a ship with thousands of passengers on board (including crew and civilians) is sent out to inhabit another planet. Over the course of the mission something goes wrong, and that’s where the film begins. Waking from hyper-sleep, Corporal Bower (Ben Foster) has no memory of who or where he is. Bower’s lieutenant, Payton (Dennis Quaid) wakes next and the two of them try to piece it all together as their memory slowly returns. 

Without a stable power source, Bower figures that if he can get to the reactor he can start up the ship and possibly land it. Venturing out in the ducts he is soon faced with what appears to be an alien species and is now fighting for his life. He’s soon joined by a couple of other surviving crew members and together they forge on.

While left in the control room waiting for Bower, Payton starts to sense signs of pandorum – a fictional psychological condition that causes severe paranoia, shaking and hallucinations after being in space for long periods of time. Will Bower succeed before Payton goes insane? Or will the aliens finish them off first?

Foster, who was amazing in 3:10 to Yuma and the television show Six Feet Under does a great job with what he was given to work with. He’s meek while still coming across as tough and powerful. Quaid, too, does a decent job but isn’t on-screen enough. The script is thin and repetitive, whether it’s the lines — “Where are we?” is uttered at least twenty times by each of the characters — or the situations that befall them.

The effects are good, I give it that. And the sound was intense. I also liked some of the ideas the film had about how the aliens were actually mutated passengers. If this was a video game (and I’m sure writer Travis Milloy and director Christian Alvart played many of them to prepare for this) it would be groundbreaking. But as a film it lacked something and judging by the restlessness of the audience (a few people walked out of the screening) I can’t see this being well-received by the masses.

** out of 5 stars

Rated R
Cast: Ben Foster, Dennis Quaid, Cam Gigandet, Antje Traue
Directed by: Christian Alvart
Official Site IMDb 

brian.mckechnie@citynews.rogers.com

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Top image: Ben Foster in Pandorum. Courtesy Alliance Films.