Review: Pandorum

There's just no other way to put it. "Freaky as shit."

Alien has spawned yet another offspring, and it's of a particularly nasty sort. Producer Paul W.S. Anderson, already having Event Horizon and Resident Evil under his belt, proves to be the life support of the genre, birthing the next step in its evolution with Pandorum. Grungy, dirty, gory, scary, crazy, and claustrophobic, and, above all, dark; it's sci-fi horror pushed to the extreme. Dark on steroids.

The lights are turned out and we're thrown in headfirst with Colonel Bower (Ben Foster), waking up in a more grittily-realistic hyperspace chamber than accustomed to. It's the future, and planet Earth has run out of gas. The ship Elysium (oh so cleverly Christened) is en route to an Earth-like planet called Tanis, but of course, something has gone wrong. Soon following is his superior, Lieutenant Payton (a formulaic Dennis Quaid), and that's it; even after seeing the above image, or the cast list, you will still genuinely feel that they're the only ones on the ship.

From there, it's a downward spiral into the deliciously-labyrinthine ship, deeper and deeper with your dark corridors, faulty communicators, and ultra-quick humanoid monsters, not to mention the usual runaround of plot twists for good measure. But the cast handles the clichéd material well, having a remarkable, workhorse quality to them: Foster more than holds his own in carrying the film. Antje Traue (somehow) pulls off the 'pretty-faced tough girl' role. Eddie Rouse looks like he's been holed up in a ship for years. Dennis Quaid feels like he was just getting another paycheck, but he gets a pass here. And Cam Gigandet strikes just the right nerve in creating a crazy under the titular ailment. It's your classic assemblage of sci-fi on a ship, a little bit of everything, and everybody.

At the heart of the fun is Pandorum's pace. Jumping around the ship, every new location a fresh one and sometimes in flashbacks at that, it's a rollercoaster that doesn't know how to stop, sometimes for the better, sometimes for worse. What this inevitably leads to is your typical third-act meltdown, but after seeing Danny Boyle's Sunshine, it seems to be a hallmark of the genre.

Like David Lynch's Inland Empire, Pandorum is a nightmare thrown onto the screen, even if of a more conventional variety. The world that Anderson, director Christian Alvart, and the writers create is not one that deserves a sequel, per se, but one which deserves exploration: discussion, imagination, fan fiction, whatever; it's brimming with potential, and exhilaratingly interesting. Many will hound the film for its 'pan and scan' of the sci-fi-horror canon, and yes, it's The Descent, it's The Abyss, it's everything you want from sci-fi horror and then some, but that's why it works: Freaky as shit.


**** out of ****

~ Patrick Fryberger