Not Impressed

This weekend I had to choose when I was off to the theatre. There were 2 movies I wanted to see that were both sci-fi and I wasn’t expecting much from either of them. There was Surrogates which looked interesting and kinda lame at the same time but it had Bruce Willis and I do like me some Bruce Willis. Then there was Pandorum. The biggest name it had was Dennis Quaid but I had seen a lot of ads for it and it seemed to have potential. In the end Pandorum won out. It seemed like it would be deeper and have a more complex plot/storyline and that is what I was looking for. I am not sure but I think I was wrong about my choice.

The movie takes place aboard a spaceship, the Elysium. The earth has become over populated and this ship holds settlers going to a distant plant to create a new home for the human race. But something has gone wrong and some of the settlers have mutated into vile, savage, cannibalistic creatures. Bower (Ben Foster) and Payton (Dennis Quaid) awake from an extended hyper-sleep. They have amnesia and have to figure out where they are and what is happening.

Pandorum wasn’t horrible, it just wasn’t very good. It tries really hard and fails. The problem with the movie is that is wasn’t sure what it was trying to be. As I watched I easily picked out the filmmakers influences. There were elements of Aliens, The Abyss, Event Horizon, and even Titan AE. The thing is that these elements seemed to have been haphazardly thrown together. With the dark foreboding setting and bloody violence of Aliens, the use of light and water of The Abyss, the creepiness of Event Horizon, and the partial “save the human race” storyline of Titan AE you would think it would have worked out but it was frustrating because they took all the good elements of these movies and turned them into an uninteresting and bland film.

The movie also suffered from what I will call “9 Syndrome”. Which means it looked great but everything else lacked. It started of interesting. It was dark, tense, and disorienting. But it wasn’t long until that mood was lost and the movie meandered on into nothingness. The dialogue was sloppy, the plot had many holes, but at least the 2 main actors seemed to have tried. Quaid and Foster were into their roles and if this was an overall better film their performances would have been a highlight but because this movie couldn’t figure out what it wanted to be their acting seemed melodramatic. And there is no point in talking about any of the other actors in the movie. They just did do anything particularly interesting.

No I can’t recommend Pandorum. I guess if it comes on TV or if you rent it, it could be passable, you would be able to walk away and come back but don’t pay and be trapped in a theatre with this movie.

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