Review of Pandorum (2009) by Austin W — 21 Oct 2012

List of pluses and minuses:

+ exciting scariness.

+ the space flight to newly discovered earth-like planet. The film even mentions the Kepler telescope! The plot isnt at all ridiculous either, like I first thought, its actually well thought.

- the cannibal mutant idea has been over used in my view and so were other themes in the film. I think the film script mimicked at least five movies. So that wasnt very original.. but it was done well.

+ surprising ending - didn't quess that happening.

- lack of change in the surroundings, even though they were in a space ship some change of scenery would have added to the effects a lot.

+ well done fights.

Well, here we have a movie with likeable actors, scary monsters, claustrophobic-running-around-in-a-spaceship, traveling to a new earth like planet, lots of fights and also lots of similarity to the Alien and other horror movies.

I personally think the creatures looked similar to the vampires of Blade II and a bit like an Alien. There are many such similarities in the film but this is a movie review, not a listing.

Mimicking other films of the genre is not necessarily such a bad thing since that is done in a cool and surprisingly original way. When its surprising, it looks so original that its possible its original and the similarities are just coincidence. With this film I dont think so. I think its intentional, but you wont notice anything if you haven't seen those other movies.

Its very violent though, but in this film its sort of understandable. People being eaten, well, they are cannibals. I liked the film more than I had liked Event Horizon. This has more style in my view..the similarity to vampirism is very obvious too. The film digs deep into the following films; Alien 4.. Alien 3..ghosts of mars.. resident evil...blade ii...predator.. event horizon.. abyss.. but if one pushes all the similarities aside from ones mind, one will enjoy it much more than one would were one to continously think -hey where did I see that before? Well, the film is great, and was a positive surprise. One of my favorites.