Rent Pandorum on Amazon Video (paid link)
Written by: Travis Milloy (screenplay), Travis Milloy and Christian Alvart (story)
Directed by: Christian Alvart
Starring: Dennis Quaid, Ben Foster, Cam Gigandet, Norman Reedus
Rated: R
Watch the trailer
Plot
Two crew members of a spaceship wake up from hypersleep with no memory of their mission or who they are, discovering that all their colleagues are missing.
Verdict
This does just enough to set itself apart despite borrowing heavily from other sci-fi stories. Questions abound as we ponder what went wrong with this mission, searching for answers along with the remaining crew. We're provided plenty of fodder for guesses. With a split focus, and a proverbial timer, the action never lags. Despite the deficiencies in the story, the conclusion helps make up for it.
Watch It.
Review
A couple centuries into the future a spaceship is launched from Earth as the last hope due to overpopulation. Most of the inhabitants hypersleep with a rotating crew to manage the ship. At some point in the mission Bower (Ben Foster) wakes up to find the ship in disrepair and his colleagues missing. He's disoriented due to the hypersleep and can't remember anything. Soon after Lt. Payton (Dennis Quaid) awakes, experiencing the same symptoms. Unable to remember anything and with no one else to provide information, they separate. Payton stays behind to watch the monitors while Bower crawls through the ventilation duct to access the reactor which is malfunctioning.
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| Ben Foster, Dennis Quaid play Bower, Payton |
It's all a pretty typical opening, waking up on a ship with no memory of the mission, but this shifts when Bower exits the duct and finds some kind of mutants. What's their origin? Were they on this ship or is the hull breached?
It's convenient that their comms cut out just as Bower exits the duct. Of course it reconnects at the worst possible time as these mutant humanoids are nearby. Bower manages to evade and encounters another flight crew team member that provides a few cryptic answers before running into someone else on the agriculture team that only speaks Vietnamese. The fact Bower is still alive is movie magic. There are so many instances where he's nearly killed. I wonder how anyone is alive.
While Payton watches the monitors someone appears. With how many people seem to appear, Gallo could just be another disoriented crew member, but the movie has also hinted at space madness, pandorum. Is Payton or Gallo going mad?
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| Ben Foster plays Bower |
We finally get answers when a cook captures Bower and his recent acquired friends. It's convenient that the cook drew a mural on his wall to tell the history of the ship just in case anyway came by. Maybe he tells the story to all his victims. It paints a harrowing tale of what happened on this ship.
This is a story of what can go wrong will. Bower's entire mission is fix the reactor. When he finally finds it, that's the room where all the mutants sleep. Nothing is ever easy. The threat of pandorum is present from the beginning and by the end, anyone might be susceptible.
The best part of this movie is the conclusion when we find out where this ship is. The movie has a lot of neat ideas, pieced together from other sci-fi stories, though the plot relies on convenience frequently. It's never less than intense, and surprises abound. Nothing is quite what it seems. The satisfying conclusion makes a better impression for the rest of the movie.
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