The Movie Blog

Pandorum Review

By John - September 27, 2009 - 22:48 America/Montreal

Thanks for checking out our Pandorum review. I’m a sucker for just about anything with Dennis Quaid in it (he’s one of the only reasons I had any hope at all for G.I. Joe), and Ben Foster is evolving into one of the best actors working in Hollywood today (his performances in “30 Days of Night” and “3:10 To Yuma” were just absolutely mind blowing). Combine that with the fact that I get excited about almost any Sci-Fi movie and you end up with Pandorum being very high on my list of films I’ve wanted to see this year. It struck me as a sort of “Alien” type of movie (sci-fi/horror). So off I went to check it out this weekend. Did it disappoint? Yup… sure did.

THE GENERAL IDEA

The synopsis for Pandorum reads something like this: “Two crew members are stranded on a spacecraft and quickly - and horrifically - realize they are not alone. Two astronauts awaken in a hyper-sleep chamber aboard a seemingly abandoned spacecraft. It’s pitch black, they are disoriented, and the only sound is a low rumble and creak from the belly of the ship. They can’t remember anything: Who are they? What is their mission? With Lt. Payton staying behind to guide him via radio transmitter, Cpl. Bower ventures deep into the ship and begins to uncover a terrifying reality. Slowly the spacecraft’s shocking, deadly secrets are revealed…and the astronauts find their own survival is more important than they could ever have imagined.”

THE GOOD

As expected, the performance of Ben Foster as Bower was impeccable. The role was a challenging one. A role that called on the performer to convince an audience of complete bewilderment, confusion, fear, intensity, bravery, terror and excitement all at the same time without going overboard on any of them. When Foster’s character wakes up completely unaware of who he is or where he is, he conveys it perfectly, and continues to do so throughout the movie. I’ve got to confess that despite the fact that I still believe Dennis Quaid is a better actor than Foster, he stumbles a bit through the movie and doesn’t come across nearly as convincing as Foster does. Foster almost saves this movie… but doesn’t. Which leads us into….

THE BAD

First of all, the “mystery” of the monsters we see in the trailers was about as un-mysterious as you can get. “Oh no… what are these monsters… where did they come from… and what happened to all the passengers”? I bet if you didn’t even see the trailer and JUST read that line, you’d already guess what the monsters are, where they came from, and what happened to the passengers of the giant ship. Yes… the monsters are former passengers. There… I spoiled it for you. If you didn’t figure it out for yourself already, then you probably can’t read either, and thus I didn’t spoil anything for you at all.

Within the exposition of the story, you can clearly tell the director Christian Alvart was attempting to make observations on commentary on the condition of humanity and our base nature. These are great things to utilize when tapping into a story like this one… however you have to tap into them, or observe them, or comment on them WELL. To me they just came off as trite afterthoughts instead of existential dilemmas on the condition of man. What that leaves you with is nothing more than a monster horror movie in space, which feels quite hollow considering you KNOW they were going for much much much more.

But even then, “monster horror movies in space” CAN be a lot of fun. But even on that level Pandorum fails. The “monsters” have nothing interesting about them, nor do they really scare you at all (if they could have JUST pulled that off, it could have gone a long way to redeeming the film). Also… for those of you who have seen the movie… please tell me how on earth one of these borderline mindless monsters learned kung-fu?

The ultimate mystery of the film is essentially irrelevant. Where is the ship now and how did they get there SHOULD have been the ultimate questions throughout the film, but never does the audience care or are made to feel the need to care. By the time the “mystery” is revealed at the end it feels pointless. A big “reveal” in a movie should do something to alter how an audience perceived or increase their understanding of all that came before it (think of how the reveal in “The Sixth Sense” does that), but in Pandorum, it’s just another fact to end the movie that on a practical level changes or would have changed anything else in the movie up to that point, and thus felt like useless noise by the time they finally got to it.

OVERALL

Overall, Pandorum is an intelligent idea for a movie that isn’t executed intelligently. A mystery film with no mystery. A horror film with no horror. A monster movie with lame monsters… and although it clearly tries to be much more and much deeper than any of that, it falls well short and ultimately comes off as a movie that thinks it’s smarter than it is. A terrific performance by Ben Foster almost makes it watchable, but doesn’t get you there. Overall I give Pandorum a 2.5 out of 10.