Pandorum

Not just a spiritual sequel to Event Horizon, Christian Alvart’s Pandorum is a love letter to Dead Space. In the annals of videogame non-adaptations, this will have to go down as one of the best.

For the first 30 minutes, Pandorum is a step-by-step reconstruction of EA’s survival horror. Ben Foster is the crewman on an apparently abandoned deep space craft that turns out to be populated by an army of grotesque, flesh-eating monsters.

Dennis Quaid is the stalwart older member of the team who sits in the safety of the command room and provides a reassuring voice in Foster’s ear, guiding him along a succession of dark corridors as Foster struggles to uncover the mystery of this futuristic Marie Celeste.

But gradually, almost imperceptibly, Pandorum begins to assert its own identity. It is the twenty-second century and Earth has been abandoned after over population brought the planet’s ecosystem to its knees. In a last ditch attempt to ensure the survival of the species, the spaceship Elysium was launched on a centuries long expedition to the planet Thanis – an Earth-like pile of rock light years distant capable of supporting life. A few thousand chosen few are put in cryogenic stasis along with a Noah’s Ark of plant life vital to sustaining the colony when they arrive at their new home.

If it sounds like a thrilling update of When Worlds Collide, Pandorum soon reveals itself to be a modern beast, taking its beats from that videogame aesthetic and soon ramping up the action to include inexplicable kung fu masters and a chesty heroine to complement our confused crewmen and his deformed, alien adversaries.

Eventually we learn that Earth was destroyed, a realisation that triggered a bad case of ‘pandorum’, a kind of intergalactic cabin fever whose onset caused a bout of homicidal madness among the crew members on shift. An evolutionary accelerant was released into sleeping passengers who slowly – well, rapidly – adapted to their new environment by turning into fleshless cannibals.

So, Pandorum stakes out its territory as an enjoyably brainless violent thriller in which Ben Foster is excellently cast as a confused Everyman forced into a race against time – not only are monsters hot on his tale, the whole ship is about to self-destruct and only he can save the day. In this particular space, people can most definitely hear you scream as Alvart ratchets up the decibel level along with the tension, filling the musty corners of the Elysium with all manner of squeaks, squeals and clanking, creaking dread. Indeed, the spaceship itself is a key character, and a convincing time-blasted piece of hulking mechanics.

But it’s when Pandorum tries to pull the Event Horizon psychological trick (Paul ‘WS’ Anderson is an exec producer) that things start to unravel. One of the film’s twists will be obvious to anyone with experience of the genre at least an hour out from its shocking reveal. But it’s putting it mildly to say that the climax raises more questions than it answers. It would be too much of a spoiler to raise all the inconsistencies and logical flaws here, but suffice to say that they are legion.

Still, Pandorum is dumb, noisy fun. Its flaws are inoffensive inasmuch as Alvart doesn’t give off Anderson’s noxious vibe of insincerity, and it’s acted with gusto by Foster and Traue – who’ll be welcome at sci-fi conventions for the rest of her life. Or at least until she loses her looks. Dennis Quaid plays smartly against type – indeed it’s a testament to his star power that you feel yourself instantly relax when he’s on screen as if your dad has arrived to tell you it’ll be okay. Only, on this ship, it’s not. And as the blood flies, necks are cut and people get eaten, you wouldn’t have it any other way.

Matt Bochenski

Anticipation:

If you're a sucker for sci-fi you'll be secretly looking forward to it.

Enjoyment:

For the most part Pandorum delivers solid action, decent effects and good performances.

In Retrospect:

But it sure as shit doesn't make any sense.