Systems Failure

Wanna watch a movie go from Alien to Event Horizon in just under two hours? Pandorum is the movie for you!

This atmospheric and moody horror-thriller-scifi movie caught my attention when it ran in theaters a few months back; not enough to get me to go at the time, but enough for me to take note and throw it in my Netflix queue for when it was eventually released on DVD. Starring Dennis Quaid and Ben Foster, it follows an interstellar "Noah's Ark" from Earth around 150 years in the future, when the enormous population of Earth has used up every last resource on the planet. The people of this ship -- all kept in stasis except for a skeleton flight crew that wakes up in rotations to monitor the ship -- are all that's left, and bound for the one extra-solar planet that humans have discovered that's Earth-like enough to sustain a new beginning.

But something has gone horribly wrong. The movie opens with the two main characters awakening from hypersleep -- near total amnesia being an unfortunate side effect. Warnings are going off about the imminent failure of the ship's reactor, and there's no sign anywhere of the crew these two were meant to relieve, nor of anyone else in their flight crew.

The opening 20 minutes of this movie are just plain awesome. The look of the ship, the claustrophobic mood, the uncertainty of what's happening and even who these people are, and the grisly discoveries they soon make. Well, like I said, it conjured in my mind thoughts of the original movie Alien. This was the set-up for a masterful psychological suspense film.

But then things begin a sad and steady journey off the rails. At the risk of spoiling things, it turns out the ship is infested with cannibalistic mutants that are killing off the handful of people on the ship who awaken from their hypersleep pods. This concept is decidedly lame compared to the fantastic set-up, and gets more boring the more the movie exposes of the truth.

Before long, the tense drama between the only two people who might be awake on the entire ship picks up an oddball and unnecessary array of sidekicks that deflate the suspense and turn the movie into a sub-par action flick. A few events trying to pass themselves as plot twists (but that you'll see coming from a lightyear away) step in along the way, but ultimately the movie ends up as lame and laughable as Event Horizon -- and an equal waste of a fine premise and good pair of starring actors.

I have no idea where I'd have taken the movie, were I writing it... all I know is that I wish something wholly different was attached to that fantastic opening 20 minutes. I was so entertained at the outset, in fact, that I'd average the film overall at a C-. Still... I'm basically telling you: don't see this movie.

Unless perhaps you're a budding screen writer who wants a great lesson in how a good script can go bad.