Pandorum Review

Written by: innspecter   

I know I’m supposed to do editorials and leave the reviewing to others, but I have to talk about a movie that deserves better than it’s getting.  A few weeks ago I saw a little movie by Overture Films called Pandorum.  It was good.  I wasn’t blown away but I enjoyed myself and it had some cool scares in it too.  It reminded me of The Descent. 

I just think this movie deserves some recognition.  Horror fns are always complaining (usually rightly so) about the films that come out that suck or try to aspire to more than what they should.  We don’t want horror to be lofty and poetic, we want gore and scares and a simple story punctuated with violence, black humor and style.  My friends, Pandorum has style.  It also has actors who have no business slumming in a horror picture.  Ben Foster (second only to Ryan Gosling when it comes to quality, young actors) and Dennis Quaid lead a cast of unknowns as they try to wrest control of a derelict spacecraft from some murderous and terrifying creatures whose origins are a mystery. 

Ben Foster.  He was great in 30 Days of Night and he’s great here.  The best part of Pandorum is that everyone takes the goings on completely seriously.  This allows the audience to get absorbed into the story.  And the effect of claustrophobia is palpable.  The first twenty minutes are tense as all hell.  I was sitting in a very dark theater with few people in the seats.  I felt cramped and on edge.  As with most movies, the style and effectiveness doesn’t quite carry out for the duration, but the film remains dark.  You never get a truly clear image of the monsters.   This is partly because they move very fast, but also somewhat because the film doesn’t have a lot of light in it.   Maybe that covers up mistakes, but what worked in Alien and Jaws as far as obscuring the thing-to-be-feared works wonders here as well.  I’ve always been a true believer in the idea of “less is more”. 

Story-wise there is a simple one that connects the events of the film together.  Ben Foster’s character wakes up in his hypersleep tube to a seemingly deserted ship drifting in space with no one at the helm.  A majority of systems are down and he has to find out what happened, who is left, if anyone, and how to get to the reactor to power the ship back up and make it navigable.  The movie works best when Foster is on screen, and luckily, he’s on it quite a lot.  He has a harrowing journey around the sparsely light craft trying to find stragglers who might be able to shed some light onto what happened during his time off duty.

Unfortunately, the movie never satisfactorily reveals exactly what happened, or how long it’s been going on.  But I suppose, when your survival was the most important thing, you wouldn’t worry about the past as much as you would about securing a positive future for yourself.  Without giving anything away, coming out of that theater was like a breath of fresh air.  I truly felt as though I was coming out of an enclosed space and into the bright sunshine of the wide world for the first time in years.