Friday, Oct. 02, 2009

'Pandorum' comes off as a lively mess

By Edward Robertson, atomictown.com

Quick show of hands: who's always dreamed of flying through space for destinations and adventures unknown?

-- Times, theaters.

Now that the nerds have outed themselves, we can all proceed to laugh at them. With that out of the way, let's return to our boring present-day lives where we still have to fear disease-causing microscopic organisms (but we are so much bigger than them!) and use smooshed-up dinosaur bones to propel our horseless carriages. That's soooo cool.

Much better, I think, to be terrorized in the inky abyss by shrieking hordes of malevolent beasties, which, if sci-fi movies like Pandorum are to be trusted, is our inevitable destiny. Good times.

Roughly two hundred years in the future, the Earth's population has passed the 25 billion mark. As the struggle for resources intensifies, a massive spaceship is launched into the skies.

Crewmen Ben Foster and Dennis Quaid awaken from hypersleep to find their memories are missing and the ship's power is failing. They seem to be alone, but when Foster climbs into the air ducts to find out what's happened, he finds himself hunted by vicious, humanoid monsters who've all but taken over the ship.

Eerily, this mirrors my last trip on Carnival Cruise Lines, right down to the narcotic sense of confusion. Pandorum plays its cards right in taking a long time to let us in on what's going on, giving us no more exposition than whatever Foster can discover by running into his fellow crewmembers, many of whom are hung in various states of disembowelment.

This is a sound strategy. The need to know what's happening hooks you right away, and later, if it turns out the answers to the mystery are a big cart of bullshit, you've already been kidnapped by the movie so long you've got the cinematic equivalent of Stockholm Syndrome. Are Pandorum's answers BS? Maaaaybe! Hey, no skipping to the end! It's the getting there that's half the fun.

And what's more fun than getting hunted down by ghost-pale monsters that look like the fugly children of the cave-people from The Descent and the aliens from Aliens ? Only watching it happen to other people, of course. Without feeling derivative, director Christian Alvart taps into the same claustrophobic dread those two films conjure up so well. The spaceship ends up being a great setting, both massive and cramped, capable of hiding anything in its dark, dark, and did I mention dark crannies.

Unfortunately, one of the things hiding around those dim corners is not a bunch of interesting characters. Foster's an amazing talent with little to do here but ask everyone around him what's going on, and the makeshift team he assembles falls squarely into two camps: the laconic badass or the blathering maniac.

There's enough action and intriguing weirdness to prevent this from being a big deal, but it's always a letdown when the environment is so much more interesting than the people in it.

They do, at least, eventually get around to working out what's up. It's just that most of the answers are more like guesses, or it turns out the questions themselves never made sense in the first place. (Like, for instance, what is pandorum? I get that it's space madness — I saw that excellent episode of Ren and Stimpy more times than I can count — but it seems to be more than that, too.)

It's a mess for sure, but the good news for Pandorum is it's a gooey, lively, exciting mess you wouldn't mind diving into again. For now, I'm a skeptical passenger — but I can't help admitting I enjoyed the ride.

Grade: C+