Review of Pandorum (2009) by Chads. — 25 Sep 2009

With his scenes confined to a single interior, Dennis Quaid, who once tried on a number of scared silly looks while braving a haunted house in Mike Figgis' "Cold Creek Manor", tries to avoid looking silly in "Pandorum", a cheesy but not outright awful monsters-on-a-spaceship movie, presented in the key of "Alien".

Although Quaid eventually does interact with the sci-fi tropes, the B-movie thrills, his sequestering for much of the film's running time smacks of a concession made by the filmmaker. And this is the message sent: "Pandorum" is not worthy enough, intuits the moviegoer, for its A-lister to grab a glow-in-the-dark stick(as his co-star Ben Foster does), and be hunted by a race of bald, cannibalistic mutants like a good sport.

Since there's nobody to window-dress the fight sequences, and lend some gravitas to the small group's search for Elysium survivors(in which crawling over a bodied sea of bald, cannibalistic mutants is required), "Pandorum" often looks and feels like a straight-to-Blockbuster production.

Amid the ghosts of Ridley Scott and James Cameron that this none-too-original movie defiles, exists a more cerebral brand of science fiction alongside all the interspecies fighting. Late in the film, Quaid finally gets to do more than bark instructions into a radio, when his character(Payton) is joined by another survivor(Gallo, played by Cam Gigandet) in the ship captain's cheese-resistant niche, where their heated exchanges prove to be a much better fit for the film's modest budget.