“Pandorum” is a sci-fi film guaranteed to leave you bored from its opening frame to its last, and perhaps even a little queasy. It tries so hard to be as good as a number of much better sci-fi films, but fails at every turn, leaving behind a completely incoherent, loud mess of a film that is filled with enough plot holes to fill a warehouse.
The film begins as Bower (Ben Foster) wakes up on a spaceship, not knowing where he is or what he is doing there. Not long after he wakes up, Payton (Dennis Quaid) also wakes up, also not knowing where he is or what is going on. Since they are trapped in the room they woke up in, Bower decides to crawl through the ceiling to find out more about what they are doing there. He encounters two other crewmembers, but also some very strange creatures who seem to have a taste for human flesh. For some reason, he decides to head towards the reactor with his two new friends, but getting there is not exactly easy.
The film it’s obviously trying to be most like is Ridley Scott’s masterpiece “Alien,” but it fails to create any of the suspense, mood, or atmosphere, that Scott had so brilliantly created with his film. It’s not as easy as sticking a few people on a ship and throwing in a creature, or in this case several, that want to kill them.
Weighing the film down are an ill-conceived and terribly written script that gives its characters nothing interesting to say and nothing interesting to do. The film consists mostly of some of the characters wandering around the ship and running away or fighting with the creatures on board, while Dennis Quaid gets absolutely nothing to do in the room he woke up in. Speaking of the fight scenes, they are very poorly edited, turning them into quick blurs, once again proving that many filmmakers think that the film-going public only has an attention span of about 1-2 seconds.
It certainly doesn’t help that most of the film takes place in an almost completely dark ship with many scenes being lit only by a lightstick. I know that director Christian Alvart is attempting to create the atmosphere from those much better films, but not allowing us to see anything is certainly not going to help us get engaged in the story.
The plot holes started adding up far too quickly as the film went on. It tries to give us some half-baked explanation for the creatures, saying that they are crewmembers who have been changed by an evolution-starting gene that adapted them to the ship instead of the new planet they were going to, but it never explains why or how this gene got out to everyone or why it didn’t affect the main characters.
It is never explained as to how the characters that Bower meets find their way onto this ship. We are told that they are from different flight crews, leaving us to wonder where their ships are and how they could have possibly gotten on board, especially considering the situation we find the ship in at the end of the film.
There is an even bigger plot hole at the end, but to go into it in detail would give it away. By the end, “Pandorum” becomes completely incoherent and nonsensical, taking turns that the audience can’t see coming because they lack any logic as to why they are happening. We’re supposed to believe that most of the crew is suffering from a disease called Pandorum, which is basically defined as being crazy in space, but it adds nothing to the already lacking story and only serves to allow the characters to attempt killing each other at the end of the film.
If you’re looking for what “Pandorum” tried to accomplish, simply go back and revisit “Alien,” or even “Event Horizon,” another film that “Pandorum” is trying to emulate in part. It’s no wonder that the studio chose not to screen this for critics. They knew they had a dud on their hands. If only they could have been more truthful with their audience by including the tagline: “In space, no one can hear you sigh.”
1.5/4 stars.