RSS
Home
Movie review: 'Pandorum' (Dead Space or Space Hulk?)
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
Pandorum/2009 - Directed by: Christian Alvart
Starring: Ben Foster and Dennis Quaid
The Plot: At an undisclosed location in our universe, after an unknown period of years, two astronauts awaken to discover that they don't know who they are, where they are, why the massive star ship they're on is in such bad shape, where everyone else went to, and even worse - where did all the creepy space cannibals currently haunting and hunting in every airlock and corridor of their vacant spaceship come from??
The Good: There are usually a few key tip-offs that will tell you if a new movie is going to suck or not. When you check your local listings to see which theater you'll be seeing the new release in and discover that it's only playing in one or two specific theaters instead of the megaplex medley that usually accompanies any new Hollywood release - that right there should at least trigger some genetic human survival-instinct to avoid the film just as the theater chains have avoided it. And if the flick has Dennis Quaid in a starring role....?
That ain't a good sign either.
Not that Dennis isn't a capable actor or even a gentlemen and a scholar, it's just that he's been phoning in his roles lately, (Go Joe!) taking paychecks instead of risks. So after discovering that Constantin's Pandorum crawled into two local theaters draped in the sickly weave of a Quaid plague blanket imagine my shock and horror when the flick actually turned out to be decent - nay better than decent - good even, maybe even hammering at the gates of semi-great...
What Christian Alvart gets absolutely right is attention to detail and pace. It's the exact same formula that Ridley Scott adhered to with the original space/horror phenom Alien. We spend some time getting to know our characters, our environment, how things work or were supposed to work in this fictional future of ours. Then and only then are the space demons unleashed. When Alvart lets his off the chain his film takes off and the battle is on. I have no idea how big Ben Foster is - how much he weighs or how tall he is. I'm assuming he's like everyone else in Hollywood: short and impossibly thin. The biggest surprise in Pandorum is that Foster can carry an action/sci-fi/horror flick with a feral intensity only seen in the cock-fighting ring, and that the guy can still be a thespian while doing it. Vin Diesel eat your heart out.
Foster's a terrific talent to have in your corner for a flick with an admittedly B-movie ring-tone to it. He sure helped Quaid channel a little bit of his old dusty charm when the two guys shared the screen together. I can't help but think that if Alvart skimped on the cast and pumped all of the cash and energy into the effects work we would have had that big, beautiful, sh*t-flick I was worried about in the first paragraph of this review. But he didn't and the film pays-off in a way that it probably never should have.
The one film and filmmaker I was reminded of while watching Pandorum last Friday was a young-ish Alex Proyas and his film Dark City. Not in theme or in plot, but in burgeoning talent and execution. Both movies have new filmmakers with ideas far too extensive for a major studio to gamble mountains of cash on producing, (in this case distributing) but that didn't mean that these guys weren't going to get as close to the original idea as they could. Pandorum's a huge movie on a micro-budget. It's nox exactly perfect, but it's not terrible either. It's much meatier than its trailer or marketing might suggest. Are we talking about the the second coming of Alien here? Of course not. But it's a damn site better than 90% of what the fumbling sci-fi/horror sub-genre usually has to offer. Even Horizon included.
The Bad: Too much of the action is either too dark or too fast to properly digest. Pandorum warrants a repeat viewing just to see what the hell was going on most of the time. I'm thinking this might have to do with limited funding and set limitations, but it sure didn't help juice-up the action sequences in the film. I felt like an 85 year old guy at a strip club - squinting painfully in the hope that I just might catch a glimpse of something cheeky but still complaining that the lights are too dim, the music's too loud, and the drinks are too watered down...
And we'll just say it here because it's pretty much what everyone is going to be saying about this movie anyway: The "creatures" carry more than just a passing resemblance to The Descent's cave-crawlers. Alvart's are a bit more evolved, and he gets some points for using actors in make-up and costumes instead of CG-ing the sweet buh-jeezus out of em' like Francis Lawrence did with his Descent imitators in I Am Legend. But you won't be able to shake the feeling that you've seen and heard these beasties before - maybe even in Middle Earth...
The Fugly: So how much did Pandorum make last weekend? (said like Dr. Evil) 4.4 mill-yen dollars! That's enough money to feed all the people on the international space station for seven straight hours. The government could bail-out Joseph Enterprises Chia-Pet dynasty with that chunk of change. Steve Wynn has that much in coins cluttered under his sofa cushions... Yada-yada-yada...
The Verdict: Yep, the receipts aren't pretty but the film in question does indeed deserve a look. Which is why I'm writing this review a few days too late. Pandorum gets a lot of stuff right, very little wrong, and has my nomination for sleeper hit of 2009. It's a strong sci-fi/horror flick with a better than average concept and cast - plus a nice little vein of mystery and revelation humming through it. Pass it over in its limited, (and admittedly disappointing) theatrical run if you must, but come DVD day you'll probably want to throw this film on your Netflix que. You might just be surprised at how much movie there is here to enjoy.
Related Articles:
Comments
