DVD Review

Title: Pandorum

Studio: Alliance Films

Director: Christian Alvert

Principle Cast: Ben Foster, Dennis Quaid, Cam Gigandet, Antje Traue, Cung Le

Length : 108 minutes

Rating: 14A

Release Date: January 19, 2010

Reviewed by: Rhys Dowbiggin

Imagine you wake up with little memory of who or where you are. The room is dark, gloomy, and generally an unsettling environment. You’re memory is hazy, save for the thought that someone should be there to greet you. No one is there. The only way in or out of the room is a door.

What would you do? Would you risk opening the door? What unspeakable horrors could be lying in wait on the other side? In the end, the only thing to fear is fear itself.

Pandorum begins with a short contextual synopsis typical of most sci-fi films (more on that later). A man wakes up from hyper-sleep in a pod that would test even the least claustrophobic. The pod opens and he falls to the floor. He finds himself in a spaceship navigation deck. A second man awakens soon after. Their memory is vague except they remember enough to know there should be others.

They set out to power up the ships reactor and find a way out. They ultimately discover the last of humankind have evacuated to space in the Elysium, a ship meant to populate the only known planet capable of harboring life besides Earth. Of course we already know this. It’s the first thing we are told via the opening synopsis. Therein lays a problem.

As a viewer, we are told this within the first 15 seconds of the movie. Yet by telling the audience before any of the action even occurs, we’re already let in on a little secret. It’s like on Christmas morning being told what you’re getting five minutes before you are given your gifts. Surprise? Regardless, the film has plenty of intrigue. Conceptually, and similar to the film Cube, the film is compelling.

The film takes its time cultivating the idea that something is very, very amiss. Unlike so many thrillers nowadays, Pandorum let’s the viewer sit and wait for the horror it will eventually unleash. Our protagonist Corporal Bower, played by the always-intriguing Ben Foster, wanders the ship trying to make his way to the reactor while his partner Payton, played by Dennis Quaid, quarterbacks the mission from the flight deck. Bower quickly realizes he’s not alone, and in a very, very bad way.

This is where the intrigue of film begins to evaporate. The ghouls Bower encounters are human mutations that, naturally, feed on people. However, they carry spears and wear makeshift armor. Huh? I guess it makes sense. If they are truly human mutations they’ve likely evolved in a manner similar to humans. Figuring out how to kill its prey would be priority number one and hence the weapons.

Still, aren’t film creatures more horrifying in a primal sense? The thought of being torn to pieces by claws and teeth rather than stabbed by a spear is what makes monster like Jaws or the Thing so scary. These ghouls bear a striking resemblance to the monsters in The Descent but do not achieve the terrifying presence that their thematic counterparts do. Bower and a few survivors he teams up with along the way attempt to outrun the ghouls, find the reactor, and figure out what in the Pandorum is going on.

The look of Pandorum is what you’d expect from a sci-fi horror with a good budget. That isn’t to say its standard-fare. Its gloomy corridors and cavernous compartments are, at times, awe-inspiring. The art department deserves a hearty ovation for their set design, which carries the film from a visual sense scene to scene. Somehow it feels like Event Horizon all over again, though.

The acting is solid for the most part; Quaid as Payton has a neat back story that is played out in a Jekyll-and-Hyde manner – a side-story confined to the room where the film begins and arguably the best scenes of the movie.  Foster plays Bower’s uneasiness very well but he never really advances past the stages of shock-and-awe. Cung Le, a renowned mixed martial artist, has a role but speaks Vietnamese which eliminates most opportunities for bad acting.

Director Christian Alvert does some great work with Quaid’s story but relies on action that bog down much of the middle and end of the film. The action sequences more or less fall flat. In one scene, one survivor goes toe-to-toe with a mutant in a David versus Goliath battle that suspends belief further than the film's concept is meant to go. Alvert deserves credit however for a number of excellent shots and sequences. When he confines the action to a single room, the film works. It’s too bad those moments can’t save the entire movie.

The special features on the DVD are quite intriguing. There is a special featurette on the making of the movie, a pair of short films that tie into the story, and a number of deleted scenes. The making-of gives perspective on what it took to make the film and an insight into Christian Alvert’s work. It explains much of what Alvert is trying to do and what the film is trying to convey.

The short films are neat and provide healthy back-story but offer little outside of that. The best special feature is easily the deleted scenes. When taken in context, one gets the feeling that those scenes were removed not by the director but by the studio. The deleted scenes are very effective and provide a ton of character and story development that the film was lacking. Clearly their omission was a time sensitive issue. They are worth the look.

Pandorum is worth a viewing if you like sci-fi. The first half hour is excellent. The film fails to sustain the suspense. It fizzles out and morphs into an action sub-genre as the film progresses. This woud have been ok if the film sustained the aforementioned suspense. Unfortunately, it only lasts periodically throughout the film. At least it’s enough to keep one from going into hyper-sleep.

Written by :

rdowb

 

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