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There is certainly a lot to unpack with the summer of science fiction films this year. “District 9” and “Star Trek” were great for their own reasons and managed to please the audience. Because of that satisfaction, “Pandorum” a film designed for that target audience, is being ignored, which is unfortunate, especially during an over packed season of films in the genre. Like I previously stated, it is unfortunate for some.
“Pandorum” takes place in the distant future on a massive vessel that has a lot of technical malfunctions. Those issues result in crew members Payton (Dennis Quaid) and Bower (Ben Foster) being forced out of their sleep. Both of them are awoken from a self-induced slumber that lasts centuries. As a collective, they struggle to gain back their common sense while trying to work together to escape the ship. In order to do that, he realizes that they need to turn on the ship’s reactor. As Bower works to get to the reactor, ruins his controls, and Payton remains at the controls, more life begins revealing itself. The life on the ship seems to be a mixture of disgusting, violent, and very, very hungry.
The first act of the film is surprisingly intense because you are struggling to adapt to the environment as Bower is. Trying to conceal and make the monsters dangerous, director Christian Alvart has us looking around to see if something is lurking, ready to rip us apart. This becomes less of an issue once the monsters are actually shown.
Nadia (Antje Traue) and Mahn (Cung Lee) are a pair of nomad rivals which lessened some of the tension of the film. Nadia and Mahn had once lived a humble and peaceful life, but now they are transformed into dirty, sexy, martial arts fighters and rivals. They are so outlandish that it seems as though they were ripped from an entirely different world. For example, a world like “Doomsday” or “Mad Max”. “Pandorum” is similar to Noah’s Arc. It has an assortment of genre hybrids. A combination of monsters that seem to have emerged from “The Descent” along with settings copied from “Alien(s)”. Derivative films are never a compliment, but also not a harsh judgement. Seeing such a muddled collection of obvious nods isn’t in the glory of “Pandorum” as a film, but it certainly is in portions entertaining.
Even with all the borrowing, “Pandorum” manages to shine due to it’s beauty and disgusting nature of the sets. It is truly remarkable when a film can wow the audience with an immaculate biology facility and then have them be disgusted with Bower, who is covered in monster slime, crawling through an as hell-like, never-ending, junk pile of slimy abominations. It becomes evident, towards the end of the movie that these settings are definitely one of the stronger points of the film. So much is said regarding the size of the ship, which makes one wonder what visual treasures we missed.
“Pandorum” opens many threads over the course of the movie, but tries to resolve all of them in the third act with mixed results. For one, the source of the monsters is elucidated, but a great deal of guessing is required to cover the gaps in the narrative. Furthermore, the treatment of the Payton character is always going to require a considerable suspension of disbelief, which is not made any easier by Quaid’s bizarre manner of performing in the last moments of the film. All these loose ends do not ruin the film, but the manner in which some of them are dealt with is quite unsatisfactory.
A more accurate portrayal of the film’s core faults is that “Pandorum” does not do a single thing poorly enough for the film to be boring or unbearable, but it also does not do anything close good enough to rise above the films its bases itself off. Even so, through the undeniable beauty of the last few moments of the film it stands as undebatable proof of the fact that, because of its imperfections, “Pandorum” can still be a very pleasing movie for diehard fans of the genre.
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