Pandorium

Merry Christmas folks! I hope you survived the night with the Robot Santa out there. I figured that I might as well post a movie review here as we all huddle in our houses fearing for our lives, while the inane robot is causing carnage outside.

When I reviewed Moon, thesh17 recommended Pandorium unappreciated low key good Scifi flick that fell between the cracks. I’m always on the lookout for good science fiction, so I added the movie to my queue. The trailer looked quite promising and I was fairly excited for this film.

Here is the impression of the plot I got from the short trailers I found on Youtube: two astronauts wake up from their cryo sleep aboard a long range transport ship to discover that all the members of the previous shift are mysteriously gone. The ship is in complete disarray, the bridge is locked from the inside and most of electronic equipment and computers either failed or needs repairs. Nothing is working, all surfaces are covered with a thick layer of dust as if no one cleaned there for years. To make matters worse, both of the protagonists suffer from temporary amnesia that commonly occurs after being thawed out from a long term cold sleep. They don’t remember their mission, their destination and have no clue what happened on the ship. As they try to figure out what happened on the ship both men start to exhibit signs of “pandorium” – a deep space variety of cabin fever that includes irrational behavior, paranoia, outbursts of violence and etc. As they try to do repairs, reactivate the ship’s systems and get to the bridge they discover clues that suggests that they are not alone on the ship – there is someone else out there. Or maybe it’s just their paranoia kicking in?

Sounds awesome right? You’d expect some well developed characters, psychological drama and a study of human behavior when put in crazy situation outlined above. I really wanted to watch this movie. Unfortunately, Pandorium is not that movie. It is something else entirely. It’s something much less interesting, less original. In fact, Pandorium is a movie I have seen before many times. It’s precisely the type of action flick that Hollywood tries to pass as “Science Fiction” these days.

You have to hand it to the creators of this film though, they did a stellar job of taking a brilliant idea and deconstructing it into something absolutely dull, uninteresting and redundant. I really didn’t think you could mess up something so good so badly. But they did it.

The rest of this review will likely contain spoilers, so if you still want to watch this film, I recommend skipping down to the last paragraph or two for my conclusions. But don’t say I didn’t warn you – the movie is disappointing at best.

You may wonder how do you get from the interesting setup I described above to a pulp action flick? Oh, it’s simple. All you need is couple of clever maneuvers.

First you add Orcs. Yeah, I’m not kidding. After about 10 minutes the two astronauts find out the ship is overrun by some strange tribe of hyper violent, mutant cannibals who look like they just crawled out of Mordor. Somehow the last shift went feral, and mutated into orc looking alien monsters. Their main source of food are human freeze pops. Apparently the broken ass ship likes to randomly deactivate it’s cryo pods all over the place. And when it does, it’s lunch time. Cue the main character running around dark corridors, climbing duct pipes while hordes of monsters are chasing his sorry ass.

Next we add the Action Chick to the mix. The hero of the story meets a sexy girl who got unfrozen few years back and learned to fend off the monsters. When they first meet, she naturally kicks the hero’s ass and then straddles him, holds him and knife point and steals his shoes. Then he saves her life. Then she saves his. Then they hold hands and run around corridors together some more, while she delivers exposition.

Then they meet a friendly Asian guy who knows martial arts but doesn’t speak a lick of English. They run around the corridors together and manage to kill several orcs due to awesome team work.

This is all happening while the other astronaut sits somewhere in a control room twiddling his thumbs and wondering whether or not he has “pandorium” or not. Apparently he does – because, check this out: he is the big bad of the story.

Here is how this is explained: the mission of the ship was to colonize a distant Earth-like planet that’s 20 something light years away from our solar system. As per standard procedures, this long range jaunt is done in 2 year shifts. A skeleton crew stays awake, while rest of the people sleep in cryo pods. This way no one has to give up the best years of their life stuck on a stinking space ship. Everyone does a two year stint and then they wake up on a new eorld and colonize it. Which is actually pretty reasonable – I have no beef with this part of the story. I’m complaining about the next one. Halfway through the trip the crew gets a message that Earth was destroyed.

Wait, what? How? When? How? HOW?

Well, they don’t know. No one tells us. Something nuclear apparently, but the characters accept it and make shocked facial expressions. Would you believe if someone told you Earth just disappeared? Yeah, me neither. It just doesn’t make sense. But no one actually questions this. No one even says a mandatory “GTFO”. Nope, this is a plot point, and every character believes it immediately after hearing about it.

That’s not all though. 5 minutes after hearing the message, the crew decides that since their home world is gone, human laws and ethics no longer apply. So what do they do? They violently murder and rape each other on the spot. They all just go crazy.

Let me put it in a proper context for you just to see how ridiculous that is. These people are colonists on a 20 year, one way trip to a new world. By the time they reach their destination, everyone they ever knew or loved on Earth will probably be gone. If they will want to send a postcard home, it will take it 20 years to reach the destination. The point is that the colony will have little or no contact with earth. It will be governed by its own laws, and it’s own customs – Earth laws will not apply there. For most colonists Earth would be just a distant memory. This is what they signed up for. If there is a group of people better prepared to cope with wholesale destruction of human race it is these folks. They already decided to cut all ties to their home world by signing up on this mission. Yes, it’s a bummer that Earth somehow mysteriously vanished in a plot induced catastrophe – but it’s not like any of them was planning to go back there. And it’s not like the fear of Earth bound laws was the only thing that held back their animalistic urges. They were frontier folks and astronauts – people who live on the far edge of society by choice. They forge their own laws, their own rules because there is no one there to keep them in check.

Sadly, in Pandorium destruction of Earth works like an dis-inhibitor of some sort. One guy for example proclaims himself to be a god and starts a new religion based on hedonism, nihilism and general fuckery. After few years he gets bored with his godhood, freezes himself up again and sleeps for a thousand years. His followers go feral without his enlightened guidance and become the aforementioned orcs. He wakes up as the second astronaut.

I don’t know about you, but it strikes me as contrived. The back story is just plain lazy. If I had to make a guess, I’d say that Travis Millroy and Christian Alvart just wanted to make a movie about a brave astronaut and the action chick fighting orcs in an abandoned spaceship. They wanted to shoot cool action scenes, and suspenseful chase sequences and awesome humanoid monsters on the set but didn’t really have a solid concept for a back story. So they just wrote the whole “Earth is gone and everyone went crazy” bit on a weekend and decided it was good enough.

Ok, I’m probably exaggerating, but this is how it feels. And it’s not like the action sequences are that good either. There is a lot of running around in dark corridors, and a lot of door based scenes. You know – the characters are either trying to reach a door before it closes, they slam a door just in time, they need to open a lock before monsters reach them. That’s pretty much the whole movie – doors, corridors, and lot of running. When it starts to be repetitive, they just throw a new character into the mix, rinse and repeat.

The film had a great potential. Whomever did the trailer knew exactly how to sell it. It appeared to be a smart, contemplative science fiction with some psychological drama and suspense. Something that SF enthusiasts like you and me would pay to see. Sadly, the actual movie is nothing more than a formulaic and lazily written action flick. One that brings absolutely nothing new to the table. The feral cannibal theme was done to death in dozen movies so far. Being trapped in a ship full of monsters has been a staple of science fiction ever since Alien. Insanity in space was done much better by films such as Event Horizon. It’s bland, unoriginal and unimpressive.

I’m not saying all action movies are bad. Not at all. I guess my negativity stems mostly from the dissonance between my expectations and what I actually saw on the screen. Expectations are a funny thing – they can make or break your movie watching experience. I saw Pandorium with high expectations. For one, it was recommended by one of my readers. I also saw a misleading trailer which gave me a completely wrong idea as to what the movie was about. And as such, I was very disappointed. As usual though, your millage may vary.

I am not a professional movie critic, and I don’t even try to be objective. My reviews are biased, subjective and based solely on my tastes, expectations and sensibilities. I write the type of reviews that I like to read myself. I like opinionated, subjective reviewers as they usually bring more to the table than those who try to be objective and interpersonal. They have a personal taste and if that taste aligns with yours, they can usually very reliably steer you towards movies and games you will enjoy. That’s what I’m trying to do here.

I guess what I’m trying to say here is this: Thesh17, please don’t take me trashing Pandorium personally. I guess we just didn’t align on this particular film. The fact you recommended it heightened my expectations and probably contributed to the feeling of disappointment I felt after watching it. Maybe if I watched it without it being highly recommended and without seeing the trailer I would view it differently. Then again, I probably wouldn’t have watched it if you haven’t mentioned it. If you have any other movie recommendations, I’d love to hear them.