Pandorum (2009)
Directed by Christian Alvart
Two crew members wake up on an abandoned spacecraft with no idea who they are, how long they've been asleep, or what their mission is. The two soon discover they're actually not alone – and the reality of their situation is more horrifying than they could have imagined.
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23 films that influenced Pandorum
What critics say influenced Pandorum
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.
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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.
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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.