Dir: Christian Alvart
I love Sci-Fi. Since I was a kid the genre has held me captivated. I remember how my dad exposed me to the classics: 2001: a Space Odyssey, Silent Running, Soylent Green, and I'll never forget the impact Star Wars made on me when I watched it with him on the big screen that spring of '77. Those early exposures forever locked me into the geek community as a fan of Science Fiction, and I am forever grateful.
Sadly, there are so few well made science fiction movies out there. I am not sure what the formula is for a good Sci-Fi movie, but many somehow just seem to miss the mark, though all the elements are apparently present. Pandorum has the makings of a good space-thriller, but falls sadly short. This time I know it is the script which was lagging.
It takes place on a colony ship traveling to a distant planet found years earlier to be habitable by the human race. We learn early on that some cataclysmic events on earth left it as the last hope for mankind to exist in the galaxy, so a lot of pressure was put on the crew, who work in decade-long shifts, to arrive safely. The story begins with crewman Bower and officer Payton waking up from deep-freeze at their supposedly allotted time to begin their shift. But, something is very wrong, because they are alone, trapped in the tail-end of the ship without power or a clue. Bower, played perfectly by the up-&-coming Ben Foster, does all the grunt work leaving the aging Dennis Quaid to relax as the befuddled lieutenant. Bower breaks into the rest of the ship to discover it is overran with a seemingly alien race that is feeding on the remaining crew-members who are running around like adolescent boys on a deserted island. At this point the action is thrilling and set design is superb. The ship, which we learn has somehow been abandoned for nearly a thousand years, periodically wakens crew-members to a struggle to survive among the “aliens”, who are actually genetically transformed human clones designed to learn to survive a yet unknown hostile environment, but which has become the powerless husk of the colony ship. Bower knows he can change everything if he can just reboot the ship's main power-source, the reactor, but he has to make it there alive. He does this by enlisting the aid of some of the wary crew who have been surviving for years by hiding among the ship's miles of corridors.
I was enjoying the movie at this point, because the acting was pretty good, though Dennis Quaid was a bit stale in his role. The genetically transmogrified clones were scary and alien. The ship was brilliantly hostile and broken and huge. It all fell apart, really, when the explanations begin to sew the plot together. I got the impression the writers had a groovy concept but were left spending sleepless nights over endless pots of coffee trying to tie it all together into a coherent story. What WE get is a final half-hour of the movie spent full to brimming with disjointed revelations leading to a deus ex machina ending that is made all the more trite by Hollywood's need to put a pretty bow on top.
Hollywood has made some impressive leaps when it comes to portraying a believable sci-fi/fantasy world. There is magic in there, when the movie carries the viewer into the dream. It is lost, however, when the fact that good story-telling is forsaken, when one artist palette is given precedence over another. A good movie is an amalgam of several art forms, not the least of which is good story-telling. And though Pandorum is pretty and impressive and conceptually inviting, it isn't a good balance of those key elements.
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