Review of Pandorum (2009) by James S — 26 Oct 2010

Let's not beat around the bush here, Pandorum is, for the most part, utter bollocks.

Trying to melt together elements from Alien, Event Horizon and throwing in the slightly less friendly cousins of Avatar's Navi could sound awesome but it reality it's a confusing, directionless mess.

Pandorum starts well enough, i.e. before it shows its hand. Ben Foster and Dennis Quaid awake from hyper sleep to find their spaceship in disarray. Foster sets out across the ship to find out what's going on and press the restart button. It's in the early scenes of confusion that Pandorum looks like it could succeed. The claustrophobia as Foster shuffles through the air vents is palpable and the scenes are fairly well done. Then the weird cannibals show up along with a couple of nomads and the story becomes a long and drawn out slog through the ship.

Long and drawn out is a great way to describe Pandorum. The film seems to last for an eternity before limping out mildly at the finish. Foster and Quaid don't share many scenes together so have little chance to establish any character chemistry.

The bad guys look cheap too and the sets look like they've been borrowed from the BBC's archive from Red Dwarf.

Pandorum seems like a good idea, a love letter to far superior science fiction movies with a few horror elements thrown in but it's just a protracted clutter of a movie which fails to hold any interest once it's let all it's surprises out of the bag.