PANDORUM (2009)

As a lover of all things Scf-Fi and all things Horror, Sci-Fi Horror is one of my favourite genres. Alien through to Alien Resurrection, Event Horizon and more recently Sunshine. Doctor Who to an extent. Even the game Dead Space on the PS3. Sci-Fi Horror really flicks my switch. So when Pandorum arrived from Lovefilm I was looking forward to immersing myself into a gory dose of horror in Space.



Begins well enough. Ben Foster awakes from Hypersleep on a huge space ship alone, no one else around and with no memory of why he's there. Interesting premise. Then Dennis Quaid wakes as well, again with no memory and they decide they have to find out what the hell is going on. Foster sets off to explore while Quaid navigates from afar.

What follows is a mess. A proper mess. A dogs dinner of a film. It has absolutely no originality whatsoever. The ship looks like all 4 of the Alien films at different times and it wants to mess with your head in the same way as Event Horizon. But it doesn't. There is a tunnel scene which is obviously a direct rip off of Captain Dallas in Alien, characters fall into a rubbish pit like in Star Wars, it hasn't got one original idea.

Then there are the creatures. Again, seen these before. In the Descent, in Creep. They run around like the demented people in Scotland in Doomsday. Before they are unveiled there is a scene where you see a shadow which looks identical to a Xenomorph from Alien.

What makes all of this even worse is that the lighting is so bad, the director, Christian Alvert (who also penned this tripe) clearly thinks darkness, pitch black darkness, is atmospheric, and the editing is so fast and jumpy, you don't have a clue what is happening. Who is dying? Who is hitting who? Who was just thrown over there? Oh hang on, I don't care.

The actors get nothing to work with except Quaid who has a decent stab at a crazy bloke. However, its difficult of course to do this when the words you have to say have had no thought put in to them at all and have been jotted down on the back of a fag packet.

I could barely continue to watch it through to it's conclusion, I didn't care one jot what happened. Then I did get to the end, finally, and do you know what, it wasn't actually that bad. A good idea executed in a mediocre manner. It became clear to me that there was a good idea at the centre of all of this for a half an hour episode of something on the Sci-Fi channel, but in order to make it work as a feature film, they had to flesh it out. Alvert clearly thought that the only way to do that would be to throw in some monsters to chase the characters around to make the film last just shy of two hours. He should watch an episode of Doctor Who and make notes. Character development, heard of it Mr Alvert?

If you want a dose of Sci-Fi horror, just see any of the films that Pandorum tries it's best to copy. And makes a complete hash of.

I hated it. Avoid at all costs.