Pandorum

Echoing such luminous sci-fi classics as 2001 and Alien, Pandorum is a terrific psychological thriller, although it does struggle at times to be coherent and original. But it's a true mindbender, and it's packed with action that moves so quickly neither the actors nor the audience can really catch a breath, which is a good move if your plot is shaky to begin with.

As with the best deep-space movies, the context is mental illness, what the Professor on Gilligan's Island called, oddly enough, "island madness." Only in space. In the distant, distant future, a ship has been sent from the Earth carrying a lot of people, headed to the only Earth-like planet ever found. Sometime during the journey, things go awry. We pick up the story as an astronaut named Bower (Ben Foster) awakens from hypersleep, abruptly; he's soon followed by his commanding officer, Payton (Dennis Quaid). The rest of the crew is gone, and the only door is locked from the outside. What's happened here? Making matters more difficult is the amnesia that each man suffers from, owing to their having been in hypersleep way longer than intended. Somehow, they must piece together what has happened and find out what lies behind that door - and throughout the rest of the gigantic ship.

Not only does the movie recall Aliens and 2001, you can also see similarities to The Descent and The Abyss; really, any movie in which people are trapped in claustrophobic environs. And although the pacing is frenetic at times, the movie is really chillingly shot (by Wedigo von Schultzendorff). On the one hand, the plot flows linearly - Bower needs to get to the ship's reactor so he can reboot it and save everyone - meaning that the actors race from scene to scene, running out of time. On the other hand, they don't piece together what's happened as quickly as they might in other, lesser films; they seem to figure things out gradually, as if assembling a puzzle in their heads. Bowers and others - and there are others - discover right away, though, that they're not really alone on the ship and that their enemies are extremely strong and fast and vicious.

Injected into this oh-my-goodness-what's-out-there madness is, well, madness. The movie's title is explained as being a sort of mental illness that affects astronauts from time to time, when they just plain go bonkers for seemingly no reason and kill everyone on board. Is that's what's happening here? Is Bower the crazy one? Or is it Payton? Are they, in fact, alone on the ship? Foster is excellent as the hero who remembers a little bit more of their mission as time elapses; Quaid, in turn, shows a few more layers than we're accustomed to seeing from him (he's usually more of a poor man's Harrison Ford). Both actors turn in convincing, full-throated performances that complement, rather than succumb to, the special effects and cinematic wizardry. Often, the effects are the entire show. Now, it's true that you won't see a lot of character development here, as you might in the most cerebral of sci-fi, but what works best here is the paucity of knowledge about the situation and the characters. By spinning the tale gradually, feeding the audience only a snippet at a time, director Christian Alvart dangles the mystery in front of his viewers without allowing them to settle back and solve the mystery on their own. When you're constantly kept on your toes with sudden lurches of unseen shapes and reverberating noises, you - like the befuddled characters - are concurrently kept off balance. The result is an unsettling, entertaining delight.

I simply loved the posters for PANDORUM, they were edgy and graphic enough to make me want to give this movie a shot even thou i'm not a Dennis Quaid fan at all. I gave it a shot earlier today and i have to say it was a pretty good movie.

PANDORUM is your classic outer space scifi movie which we really haven't had for sometime. I do have to say the aliens kind of reminded me of the creatures in the movie DESCENT just with armor. The movie itself had a feel of the original ALIEN movie. Now to what I enjoyed about this movie was the way the story evolved into a edge of your seat thriller with twist after twist. The story is what separates this from other spaceship, scifi movies. Even leaves the viewer thinking "what if" this happens. PANDORUM is a good way to enter this fall season. Great story, good effects, easy story to follow, just enough gore to satisfy everyone and not to much Dennis Quaid to make me happy!

Better than you might expect, based on the television trailers. The trailers made the film look like just another clone of the "Species" series. In fact, it's nothing like that.

The film centers around two characters who awaken on what at first seems to be a ghost ship, and quickly discover the extent to which "they are not alone." The remainder of the film parallels the experiences of the two men as they separate and seek to establish control over the ship.

The film has a well-defined plot (not a given in modern sci-fi films) and sticks to it. No wacky subplots that peter out irresolutely; no absurd romancing. Also, mercifully absent were explanations of the current state of affairs that dragged the whole movie sideways.

The finale is corny but satisfying. The movie does such a good job of taking the viewer on the journey with the protagonists, that the denouement is refreshing.

Not great film-making, but good sci-fi.

This piece does a wonderful job of adapting some of Lovecraft's lesser known but no less important works, including those focusing on evolution, social degradation, religion, duty, memory and the curious need for humans to do evil. The film quickly moves from standard space-horror fair (wake up from cryo, there's something aboard that shouldn't be), to a series of tense action sequences and engaging dialogue. The more abstract pieces of the story will be distracting to those who care more about plot than feeling, but the character work is vibrant, and the tone is despairing, without being grueling.

If you were disappointed by Promethus as much as I was, you'll enjoy this intellectual but unpretentious meditation on the future of humanity and its exploration of isolation and insanity.

It's a shame critics trashed this one and made it flop. The director and writer behind this could have become some of Sci-Fi's greatest if they were given the room to make a few more films. You can see a lot of raw talent put into this, but not all of it so perfectly refined.

The people trashing it I think have pretty dumb reasons honestly. Seems primary gripe is you can draw similarities to Alien, but the art direction and style isn't exactly like Ridley Scott, so it's bad! Dumb.

The film also has a different aesthetic to filming and editing than your typical Spieldberg or Ridley Scott style. I suspect that too is some trashed it. It has a rougher quality to its visuals, but it works quite well with the movie.

I wouldn't say the film is as refined as Alien 1, 2, or 3, but it stands on it's own.

Honestly might recommend this over Alien 4 or Alien Covenant. Definitely over an AvP movie.

Despite some derivative elements, the story and plot-line was unique and the end surprising. There were a lot of unique and novel elements.

Honestly I think people and critics just weren't in the mood for this when it came out in 2009. Maybe it was over shadowed by some other film? Or they were exhausted from too many gory scifi films in the 00's? I don't know. But if this were released new on Netflix in past few years it'd probably be considered one of the best scifi horror they made.