Pandorum

About 10 years ago, I first saw the Sci-Fi/Horror film Event Horizon, which I enjoyed immensely. Produced by Paul W.S. Anderson, Pandorum is a film that follows in the same vein. It's also the first American production from German director Christian Alvart, who previously wrote and directed the exceptional serial killer thriller Antibodies. As well as that, I'm always eager to see anything with Ben Foster. From my perspective, Pandorum had quite a lot going for it.

Paul Anderson has certainly made a lot of very terrible films, but I'll always grant that with Event Horizon he showed quite a bit of promise as a director. I'm sorry to say that some of his very worst traits have tainted Pandorum, a film that probably would have been a truly exceptional Horror if it wasn't for certain elements.

It starts out extremely well, with Bower (Foster) waking up from suspended animation on board a gigantic spaceship. He's extremely disorientated, suffering from memory loss, and the ship is seemingly malfunctioning, he can't open any doors, or get power. He manages to revive another crew member, his commanding officer, Payton (Dennis Quaid), and they manage to restore some power to a console. The following scenes are all too familiar to Alien, and have Bower crawling through ducts and maintenance tubes, with Payton monitoring his progress through the console, but the atmosphere and sense of claustrophobia here is immense. The set design and lighting are excellent, and it has a very uncomfortable feel.

But after the fantastic start, it all starts to go a bit pear shaped. The ship is crawling with creatures. Mutated ex-crew members who look and act considerably similar to the reavers in Firefly. Bower also meets two surviving human crew members, both of whom appear to be expert martial artists. One of them is a woman called Nadia (Antje Traue) who doesn't look at all dissimilar to Milla Jovovich, and as the story goes on, it starts to feel more like one of Anderson's Resident Evil films. What started as an extremely tense and psychological (if derivative) horror ends up as a farce that abandons all sense of tension and plays up the hot chick fighting monsters angle. It got me thinking to myself, what video game was this based on again?

I'm always fairly skeptical about international filmmakers who go to America, and I get the sense of director Christian Alvart being under the thumb of the producers on this one, there's too many awful Anderson-isms here. Alvart is a good director, and we get a lot of glimpses of what he's capable of here, but it just feels as though this was a good film squeezed with studio interference, that Anderson got someone to mimic his own style. That's a shame, because I had hoped for more from this.

I also wonder what must have happened with the script. The concept of 'Pandorum' is that it's a psychological disorder sustained from prolonged suspended animation that it feeds into paranoia, yet the whole notion is side-stepped for the most part in favor of lots of running down metal corridors and screaming mutants. The notions of awakening with no memory aboard a dark, malfunctioning spaceship, with the fear of someone having a dangerous paranoid delusion, it all seems like a great basis for an excellent psychological horror, but the mutant creatures element feels like it was tagged on without much cohesion.

I did enjoy it for what it was, but this is by no means a good film. I think that without the monsters, without the ass-kicking side-kicks, and most of all, without Paul W.S. Anderson, this would have been a really good film. It could have done without most of the minor characters, and it could have focused more on that claustrophobic atmosphere it had at the beginning. Ben Foster is great, especially at the beginning, and there's a lot of good ideas in Pandorum, but it's less of an Event Horizon, and more of a Resident Evil in space.