What can I say about Pandorum that I won’t be saying in a minute about Surrogates? These films run together in my mind and fit easily into the failed sci-fi collection of films that are so prevalent since the Matrix surprised Hollywood. Watch Moon if you want to see one of the best sci-fi movies of the past 20 years (and then watch Primer for another one).
Pandorum stars Dennis Quaid and Ben Foster as two crew members of an arc-like space ship transporting thousands of passengers to a hospitable replacement planet for a destroyed Earth. The film begins with them waking from a long stasis sleep expecting to take their rotation in commanding the ship as part of a many years journey. This is not a peaceful emergence from sleep and the film centers on their attempts to discover what has gone wrong on the ship during their absence from consciousness and the post stasis memory loss they struggle to shake. This is the sort of premise where success or failure is all about script and execution. The script can best be described as lacking clarity and clumsy and the execution is pedestrian in the end. The action-horror sequences are probably the best part of the film, harkening back very much to the claustrophobia of the Alien films. Ultimately, this film just never quite comes to life and the ideas aren’t communicated clearly enough or explored interestingly enough to really matter. There are even some logic problems with the timeline that I wasn’t willing to go back and attempt to clarify.
I believe this was originally slated to be a small budget independent film and was written so that it could be filmed in a single location for a meager sum. In trying to imagine how that might have panned out I cannot help but think it would have been even less successful as a project. Ben Foster has shown some promise in previous films and I hope he can get involved with more interesting scripts and projects than I have seen him working in for the past couple of years.
