Review: Pandorum

This is our blog so I can be honest with everyone here, right? I slept through about 1/4 of this movie. And it's got nothing to do with the 4 hours of sleep I've been averaging for the last month. I put that to the test when I went to see Surrogates later that night and I managed to stay awake through it just fine. No, Pandorum is an excrutiatingly dull film. One that manages to hit all the usual sci-fi tropes without adding anything original to the equation.

Dennis Quaid and Ben Foster star as Bower and Payton, two astronauts suddenly awakened from deep space hibernation. Think the opening scenes of Alien, only with apple sauce smeared over everyone's body. The two have no memory, but soon realize they're on board a sleeper ship in the far reaches of space. There are supposed to be thousands of people aboard, but nobody appears to be in sight. Upon further inspection, they discover that most of the crew is dead, but not all, and that they all might have been the victims of a deep space psychosis known as Pandorum.

But what was the original mission? Why are they out here in the first place? And where the heck did all these monsters come from? These are the larger questions to be answered, and the film chugs along at a glacial pace answering these when it becomes convenient to do so. To be honest, there is little that happens here other than Payton scavenging around dark, dank tunnels and falling a lot. He falls flat on his face more often than Larry, Moe, and Curly combined. The only real drama is whether or not he'll land on his head atleast once and maybe actually be hurt. Dennis Quaid spends the majority of the film lounging in a chair barking orders into a microphone and sounding vaguely disinterested. Funny, that's how I felt too.

Pandorum immediately evokes memories of the far better space thriller, Event Horizon, which should come as no surprise as that film was also overseen by Paul W.S. Anderson. Anderson is merely the producer here, but the nods to his film are obvious not only in look but in tone. The ship is basically one big cave, a floating death trap. But diretor Christian Alvert shoots it in such a dismal manner that it's hard to remain focused. If you're going to make a film like this, where the action is sporadic in between long stretches of inactivity, you've got to atleast make it worth looking at, and that's not the case here.

If you're interested in space horror, you might find something here worth latching on to. Then again, I consider myself one of those people and I spent a good part of the time staring at the back of my eyelids. Maybe it's best you just wait until this hits DVD. You won't have to wait long.

4/10