Christian Alvart
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It’s “Alien” meets “The Descent” in the new film “Pandorum” (opening September 25 throughout San Diego).
Imagine, if you will, taking the basics of Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (2007) and 28 Days Later ... (2003), tossing in the aesthetic of a Resident Evil picture, adding a little Event Horizon (1997), sprinkling a thin dusting of A.I. (2001) over it all, inserting a laugh-out-loud, transparent plot twist, and then shooting the whole thing in a murky imitation of Ridley Scott’s Alien.
Astronauts Dennis Quaid and Ben Foster awake from suspended animation on a spaceship grimy enough to make the one from Alien look like a Trump casino.
Bower's journey through the ship is reminiscent of Ridley Scott's "Alien," and if Alvart is going to rip off someone, it might as well be the Oscar-nominated director who understood the secret to keeping the audience on edge was letting their imagination and fears run wild and showing the antagonist as rarely as possible.
TAKE Event Horizon, Alien, Pitch Black, Predator, Cube, Sunshine and pretty much every other sci fi/horror film you can think of, stir them all together, and you're part way to getting your head around Pandorum.
Imagine, if you will, taking the basics of Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (2007) and 28 Days Later ... (2003), tossing in the aesthetic of a Resident Evil picture, adding a little Event Horizon (1997), sprinkling a thin dusting of A.I. (2001) over it all, inserting a laugh-out-loud, transparent plot twist, and then shooting the whole thing in a murky imitation of Ridley Scott’s Alien.
Directed by Christian Alvart (“Antibodies”), “Pandorum” is more easily described as a riff on the 1997 chiller, “Event Horizon.”
One of them involving Payton and Gallo feels old-hat, not far off from producer Paul W.S. Anderson's own 1997 space-set horror pic "Event Horizon," but the film's last handful of minutes are superb, even wondrous, in their game-changing ways and ultimate wrap-up.
Pandorum Evokes Event Horizon, Alien Throughout Its Story If Pandorum sounds a lot like Event Horizon (despite few storyline similarities), that’s because it’s produced by Paul W.S. Anderson, director of that film and Resident Evil.
Set entirely aboard an interstellar spaceship and containing speeches about man giving in to his evil side, Pandorum brings to mind Event Horizon.
Yet the story’s bibilical allusions, as well as its interest in issues of morality and madness (à la producer Paul W.S. Anderson’s Event Horizon) via the hypersleep-fostered insanity known as Pandorum, are too facile to prop up a lack of second-half scares, with the material devolving into outright ludicrousness when a screeching warrior creature throws the weaponless agriculturalist a spear for their showdown in an act of interspecies sportsmanship.
Murky both literally and figuratively, the film was shot in Berlin's Babelsberg Studios where 80-odd years ago Fritz Lang made Metropolis and Woman in the Moon, the movie that invented the countdown for a space launch.
The monsters run like Aliens and have developed a tribal hunting society reminiscent of the Predators, not to mention the humans being hunted by them are in an enclosed maze-like environment.
TAKE Event Horizon, Alien, Pitch Black, Predator, Cube, Sunshine and pretty much every other sci fi/horror film you can think of, stir them all together, and you're part way to getting your head around Pandorum.
The disc features the new retrospective documentary “Beautiful Streamers,” with new interviews with film actors Matthew Modine, Mitchell Lichtenstein and George Dzundza discussing working with the text, collaborating with the other actors and Altman’s working methods, which they all appreciated.
The scene where Bower (his face covered so they can’t see his nose, I guess) makes his way across a roomful of snoozing mutants is startlingly like the cartoon Beatles tiptoeing through the sleeping Blue Meanies in Yellow Submarine (1968).
It’s “Alien” meets “The Descent” in the new film “Pandorum” (opening September 25 throughout San Diego).
Bower's subsequent journey through a maze of airshafts, rubber tubes like tentacles lining the walls, is equipped with a similar sense of constriction and doom as 2006's " The Descent ."
It's nearly bad enough to make Anderson's film, from which it borrows heavily (along with The Descent and Roger Corman's Galaxy of Terror and many other, better films) look downright Kubrickian in its space-oddityness, but not quite.
The carnivorous creatures stalking the cramped corridors of the sprawling "Elysium" look like someone crossbred the monsters from The Descent with the Orcs from Lord of the Rings.
The end result is a seriously disagreeable piece of work that instantly establishes itself as the worst sci-fi horror flick to come around since 1992's Split Second, which effectively cements Pandorum's place as an Ed Woodian debacle of almost unprecedented incompetence.
Alvart has an eye for spectacle and has used his $40-million budget wisely, constructing spellbinding exteriors that pay homage to the past work of special-effects director Douglas Trumbull ( Close Encounters , Blade Runner ).
Surrogates, starring Bruce Willis as a homicide cop hunting a high-tech killer, is an amalgam of The Matrix, Blade Runner, The Island, The Stepford Wives, Terminator, Westworld and I, Robot.
Murky both literally and figuratively, the film was shot in Berlin's Babelsberg Studios where 80-odd years ago Fritz Lang made Metropolis and Woman in the Moon, the movie that invented the countdown for a space launch.
Director and co-writer Jeff Renfroe's future shocker The Colony is highly derivative, but credit where it's due: It has echoes of films as far-ranging as the grisly Pandorum and Doomsday (both 2009), The Road (also 2009, a bumper year for gory dystopias), and even Robert Altman's melancholy 1979 Quintet.
But he also made the superior thrillers Breakdown and U-571 a decade or so ago, so perhaps he (or a surrogate?) is returning to form.
Resident Evil (2002)
Directed by Paul W. S. Anderson
influenced Pandorum (2009)
Plot Characters Themes
Imagine, if you will, taking the basics of Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (2007) and 28 Days Later ... (2003), tossing in the aesthetic of a Resident Evil picture, adding a little Event Horizon (1997), sprinkling a thin dusting of A.I. (2001) over it all, inserting a laugh-out-loud, transparent plot twist, and then shooting the whole thing in a murky imitation of Ridley Scott’s Alien.
Pandorum Evokes Event Horizon, Alien Throughout Its Story If Pandorum sounds a lot like Event Horizon (despite few storyline similarities), that’s because it’s produced by Paul W.S. Anderson, director of that film and Resident Evil.
Also, like Resident Evil, there is a lone female fighter that comes to the rescue played by an attractive Eastern European brunette, and unraveling the plot's mysteries requires characters with amnesia to get their memories back.
Review in a Hurry: From the producers of the Resident Evil movies comes...a Resident Evil rip-off in space!
Fans of films like Event Horizon, Alien 3, and Resident Evil are sure to get their money worth, but I feel anyone outside of the “club” is sure to be disappointed.
Unfortunately, that all goes out the window with the introduction of superfluous supporting characters and a race of villains who, with their leather, spikes and face paint, look like the same albino goths who previously starred in 2001's " Ghosts of Mars ."
But he also made the superior thrillers Breakdown and U-571 a decade or so ago, so perhaps he (or a surrogate?) is returning to form.
TAKE Event Horizon, Alien, Pitch Black, Predator, Cube, Sunshine and pretty much every other sci fi/horror film you can think of, stir them all together, and you're part way to getting your head around Pandorum.
Pandorum, starring Ben Foster and Dennis Quaid as stranded astronauts on a ship of fanged cannibals, steals from Alien, Aliens, Event Horizon, Pitch Black, Resident Evil and the video game Dead Space.
Alien took the clean design of 2001 and Star Wars and gave us the industrial version; literally junking things up and making them feel that much more real.
Director Christian Alvart ("Case 39") sets the movie up in typical format in the sci-fi genre with a wide, panning shot of a spaceship, but quickly establishes that this isn't the latest installment of "Star Wars" or "Star Trek" once he goes inside the ship, conveying the claustrophobic nature of the situation with a tight interior shot.
I guess you can say it’s a quasi-Planet of the Apes concept, although they don’t end up on their own planet (you’ll have to see it to find out).
(Also, there hasn’t been a lead since Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Brick to take as much of a beating as Foster.
From HBO's "Six Feet Under" to 2005's " Hostage" to 2007's " 30 Days of Night," Ben Foster has made a career in recent years out of playing oddballs and bad guys.