Honolulu Weekly

Pandorum / It is minorly legendary that when Stanley Kubrick was prepping 2001: A Space Odyssey, the best sci-fi film ever made, he watched over 40 movies of that genre. Yet his masterwork does not look in the least like any one of them. Or if, in making your sci-fi debut, you don’t wish to see 40 movies, you can cast your peepers on Pandorum, which contrary to the sound of it, is neither a beauty serum or a heavy-duty mood elevator. Actually, it’s a German movie (shot in English with an American star), largely action but tricked out in sci-fi drag and chockfull of that genre’s clichés, preoccupations, and themes. It’s a rough’n tough programmer, practically one long fight sequence, with a few monsters–and a “surprise” ending.

Back to that title: Pandorum is a term for a disorienting human condition, the in-space equivalent to rapture of the deep, involving hallucinations (projection division), fractured time. jumbled memory, and the inability to make sense of what’s going, all of which infect the mind of our main character (played, intensely, by Dennis Quaid). After I saw this movie, I knew exactly how he felt.

Here’s the deal. It’s the future, see; and because Earth has just about had it (overpopulation, exhausted resources, lack of water, warfare) spaceship “probes” are sent to determine the feasibility of living on another planet–stop me, if you’ve heard this–and The Elysium, a humungous spaceship (we are told varying stories, but it seems that there are at least 6,000 people aboard) is sent on a eight year investigatory mission; but something (other than the overly-familiar plot) goes wrong.

Only two space cadets awake from their hyper-sleep bunks to discover they have overslept–and that they are sealed off from the bridge, and that “something else” is aboard the ship–and it isn’t friendly. (Hold that thought.) Besides Quaid, there is a lesser officer (Ben Foster), who tries to maneuver through the ship’s crawlspaces to find out what has happened to the rest of the ship. What he discovers is a murdered fellow crew-member, some human rebels trying to avoid being hunted down by some zombie-like mutants, and that his sleep might have lasted at least 30 years.

At this point the movie becomes quite garbled, turning into a chase/fight/survival story, and cheating us right and left by contradictory statements, discrepancies, and patches of incoherence. It also seems edited down from a much longer film, with lapses in continuity that cannot be justified by the Pandorum disorder. The hand-to-hand combat scenes, of which there are many, take dominion, as if the moviemakers have thrown in the towel.

You might be interested in knowing that all this sort of wraps up, courtesy that surprise ending, which seems more convenient for the moviemakers than for the audience. Too bad. There’s a tricky little sci-fi adventure trapped in this excess, but, unlike the characters there, it can’t manage to free itself. This is strictly for DVD consumption, with the aid of certain herbal enhancements. District 9, it ain’t.