Pandorum - A Review

As the end of the 23rd century nears, the Earth is overcrowded and polluted. A tremendous effort is put forth to build a giant, long-range ship to visit the newly discovered, earth-like world of Tanis. The Elysium is a huge structure built to transport over 6000 people to Tanis. The ship and the discovery of a new world gives humanity hope and a crew, scientists, their families and potential colonist are chosen to make the journey.

But Tanis is far away.  The mission will take 923 years. Everyone except a handful of crew members is put in hypersleep to await planetfall on Tanis.

Crew members Bower (Ben Foster) and Payton (Dennis Quaid) awaken from hypersleep to discover they are trapped in the bowels of the darkened ship...alone, without communication to the bridge, and that the nuclear reactor powering the ship is working only intermittently, portending a complete reactor failure.

Bower and Payton find out that the crews preceeding and following their rotation are missing. Moreover, it looks like the ship has been in failure mode for an extended time...possibly decades or longer...and due to the effects of hypersleep, Bower and Payton have also most no recollection of the ship's mission, their own histories, or what occured before they were frozen.

But time is running out. Bower, an engineering technician, must get to the reactor chamber and restart it manually, or the ship will blow up soon.  With the doors jammed shut, the only way out of the hypersleep bunker is through the electrical crawl spaces. Bower sets out alone with Payton staying behind to guide him using the ship's computer when it is occassionally online during power surges.

As he makes his way through the huge ship, Bower discovers that the Elysium is deserted except for a few ragged survivors and a savage pack of alien humanoids who are preying on crew and passengers as they awaken from hypersleep.

Two of the survivors, Nadia (Antje Traue), a geneticist/biologist, and Manh (Chung Lee) an agriculture crew member, join with Bower to fight their way through the cannibalistic humanoids to the reactor.

Along the way, Nadia, who has been awake for several months and who has recovered some of her memory, reveals that the Elysium contains not only the crew and passengers, but also tens of thousands of genetic samples of Earth life...enough to populate a biosphere.

But why? Bower begins to doubt Payton's motives as he unravels the truth about the Elysium's mission. Is Payton who he says he is? What really happened to bridge crews 1 through 7? Is Bower in the grips of space sickness...a type of deep-space induced psychosis called Pandorum? Is Payton? Can Bower trust his own observations? Can he survive to restart the reactor?

The truth is found in layers, but each answer brings another question until the finale when all is revealed. You'll think you know what's going on by the last 5 minutes of the movie, but you'll be wrong.

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Pandorum starts out as a creepy, bug-hunt of a science fiction movie but escalates steadily in scope. The film uses all the favored tropes to create a dire atmosphere just as any good horror movie would, including a race of cannibal humanoids that are faster, stronger and more violent than the crew members.

The plot is satisfyingly rounded with plausible reasons for all the strange things that have and will happen, though we are not belabored with too many details.

Pandorum also dishes up some great action sequences. There are some truly exciting martial arts scenes featuring Lee and Traue (the girl can fight) against the humanoids. There is even a nod to classic SF when Bower and Nadia must hide from the humanoids by jumping into a water-filled garbage pit a la Star Wars.

The costuming and special effects are top notch. I thought the makeup and costuming effects for the cannibal killers was much more effective than those used in Serenity. The excellent set design gave me the willies.

The greatest surprise in this film is Ben Foster. Foster plays Bower as an understated  pragmatist who knows what has to be done and just does it. Physically, Foster is not imposing.  He's a slender, smallish man with an open, honest face. He doesn't have a heroic build like Hugh Jackman et al.  Still, Foster makes Bower into our hero through good acting and some believable, though not flashy, action moves. 

Kudos also to Antje Truae, whom I've never seen on film before. She was delightful to watch. I hope to see both her and Foster in more films.

In summary, Pandorum is an entertaining, fast-paced ride. Part adventure flick, part martial arts spectacular, part murder mystery, part space western, it some how makes a tasty movie mash-up.

I was pleasantly startled by the unexpected but completely logical ending.

Note: Pandorum contains extreme violence, including gory fight scenes and depictions of cannibalism, and some adult language (not much). It's too scary for young children.  There is no sex or nudity.