Pandorum (2009)

Director: Christian Alvart
Starring: Dennis Quaid, Ben Foster, Norman Reedus, Niels Bruno Schmidt

SYNOPSIS

A man awakes from hypersleep on board a massive intergalactic spacecraft. He can't remember who he is or why he's there, but he knows there's something wrong - there are no lights, the door to the bridge is stuck closed and all data suggests he's been there a lot longer than he should have been.

Another man wakes up soon after, and they have to work together to work out how to rescue the ship - and what the human-like creature roaming the corridors are. Did they kill the crew, or is the related to a form of space madness known as Pandorum?

REVIEW

Pandorum is one of those strange movies that simultaneously seems both highly original and utterly derivative. The basic plot is nothing particularly original - survivors trapped with a massing force of merciless killers - but here it seems almost fresh.

Testament to this is the opening, where we see a couple of hoary old clichés - the Alien-style waking of the astronauts, combined with amnesia. The latter is a plot device that usually tends to annoy the hell out of me and stinks of lazy writing (I nearly threw large objects at my TV when the amnesia plotline suddenly appeared in the first season of 24, for example!). Here, however, it's well handled and seems organic to the plot.

Similarly, the mutated creatures on board the ship are essentially little more than a variation of Firefly/Serenity's Reapers, themselves fairly derivative, yet here they seem fine. In fact, while virtually every frame of the film can be traced back to a previous sci-fi or horror movie, I enjoyed the hell out of this.

Part of this might be the cast - Quaid is always great, Forster makes a decent hero, and the supporting cast are equally fine. In the same way, Alvart's direction is top notch, making the most of what was clearly a very low budget for this kind of movie. While some of the plot twists are a little convoluted, and some of them visible from a mile away, this is definitely worth your time.

7 / 10