Article
Pandorum Review
Pandorum is a science fiction thriller set on a space vessel making a five hundred million mile journey from earth, the crew are all asleep in and they are carrying a passenger roster of around sixty thousand people. We start the story following a crew member named Bower played by Ben Foster, Bower awakes to find that hes apparently woken up too early and there appears to be some problems with the ship, causing the power to be not working properly. Bower quickly tries to wake up his lieutenant Payton played by Dennis Quaid, who does wake up and they are both suffering from the memory loss attributed to deep sleep while traveling in space. Unable to get out from the crew quarters via the normal means as the power failures have locked certain doors, Bower sets out on a mission to get to the ships reactor to restore power and find out what has happened to the mission objective which neither Bower nor Payton can seem to remember.
Pandorum is shot very darkly and and while this does add to the tension it is also very annoying at times, when we get to the scenes that have more lighting it’s like a godsend but unfortunately for us they don’t last long, i don’t mind dark lit movies, but pandorum does take it to a whole new level which can be very annoying. The story line is very slow and it’s very drawn out at the start we are in the same boat as the characters and have no idea what is going on, which along with the darkness unfortunately adds to the annoyance of the movie. The movie is focused about a condition in space that causes humans to change called pandorum and the actual creatures in the movie are suitably maniacal and scary thats the first good point. Ben Foster is also excellent in the start of the movie where he has more screen time and really helps to pull you into the movie and it’s storyline as the film begins.
Overall Pandorum has a lot of the elements required to make a great science fiction movie, but it’s just very confusing, and as mentioned before very, very dark. It’s hard to recommend Pandorum unless your a hardcore sci fi fan, it’s not been a great year for sci fi and I’m sure Pandorum will do pretty well but overall it leaves a lot to be desired behind the stylish design.
