To say that I was hyped to watch Pandorum is a bit of an understatement. The premise set up in the trailers, although a bit familiar, also seemed eerily original at the same time. I never got the chance to check it out on the big screen, but when I saw it on the video store shelf I snatched it up immediately. I figured even if the movie wasn’t very original, it had this ultra creepy vibe to it that would at least prove entertaining.
The movie’s title “Pandorum” is the word used to describe the condition when a human develop extreme paranoia and dementia from prolonged deep space travel. In other words, when someone is in space so long that they lose their mind. In the future, Earth’s resources have all but dried up due to overpopulation. A large ship called the Elysium is created to be a futuristic Noah’s Ark, ushering tens of thousands of humans and select species into space with the hopes of finding a new home. As the voyage is extensively long and involves light speed travel, there are 6 different crews all taking different rotations between manning the ship and being preserved in cryo sleep.
When Crewman Bower (Ben Foster) is awakened via timed release, he finds that the ship is empty with the exception of fellow crewmember Lt Cooper (Dennis Quaid).The entire ship is badly damaged and most of the systems are offline. It is up to Bower and Cooper to discover what happened to the passengers and the rest of the crews. Along the way they discover that the ship is inhabited by ravenous blood thirsty mutant creatures. The two must find a way to survive these predators as well as battling the symptoms of pandorum, while finding a way to save the ship.
The film has quite a few revealing plot twists along the way, with some being more believable than others. For the most part, the story is fairly good and remained entertaining throughout. I didn’t particularly like the ending, whcih seemed like a last minute addition to the story, but overall the plot is pretty good.
The acting is fairly good overall. I really like Ben Foster’s work. He is an excellent at portraying these unconventional, oddball characters as his work as Russell Crowe’s right hand man Charlie Prince in ’3:10 to Yuma’ and his turn as the mysterious Stranger in ’30 Days of Night’ clearly demonstrate. In this film I feel he is a bit miscast. While I like Foster, he doesn’t really have the charm or authoritative screen presence to succesfully carry the movie, at least not in this role. Dennis Quaid does an excellent job as Lt. Cooper. It seems like just another Dennis Quaid portrayal until about midpoint in the film when another character is introduced that exposes some of Cooper’s darkest secrets.
Overall the movie was good, but it had the potential to be incredible. I had a ton of hope for this film and while it didn’t exactly dissapoint me, it didn’t really impress me in the way that I was expecting. The movie is definitely worth a rental, but when watching it one can’t help but feel that the movie could have been so much more than what it is.