PANDORUM review

PANDORUM review

Jul 26

Pandorum is a mess. Nothing that transpires carries any sense of consistency or coherence. The plot is a random jumble of sci-fi story threads, directionless and vague at best. The characters are shallow and generic, spouting outrageous movie-isms at the drop of a hat. The conclusion is foregone, obvious from the first act, and the tension is noticeable by its absence.

The setup is effective enough, using the time-honoured plot devices of amnesia and a lights-out haunted mansion in space, and some of the early scenes are – almost – pretty good. But then the monsters show up, and any semblance of entertainment or originality is violently drained from the picture like vital organs yanked from the monsters’ victims.

The monsters make sounds like the Predator and have ornery spinal projections like the Alien. They are filmed like the orcs in Lord Of The Rings – close-ups of gnashing teeth, etc. – and bear remarkable similarities with the grey-skinned beasts from The Descent. A brief explanation for their existence is reluctantly offered up, but it sounds an awful lot like “We wanted to have some teeth-gnashing Alien / Predator monsters in our movie, so we put them in, even though they don’t belong.” The monsters are entirely tangential to the plot, and the movie suffers for their presence.

What is the movie about? The question still lingers, hours after the movie’s ended. Pandorum syndrome is apparently a kind of star-sickness that makes your nose bleed and causes you to eject every living crewmember from your ship. The Earth exploded, or disappeared, and the Elysium – the ship our heroes find themselves on – is the last remaining bastion of civilisation. It’s plummeting inexorably towards an Earth-like planet, intended for colonisation, but something went wrong mid-flight and now everybody’s in deep monster offal.

As a diehard lover of all things science fiction, Pandorum offended me on levels usually reserved for the latest Michael Bay or Paul W S Anderson movie. In fact, when Anderson’s name appeared in the credits, like a turd hiding amongst chocolate bars, I felt a sudden sense of realisation. Of course he was involved, at some level. It carries all his hallmarks: shoddy characters, pretensions to science fiction, underlit wire-fu heavy-shutter action scenes – it’s all in Pandorum, and it all sucks just as much even without Anderson in the director’s chair.

The characters are your standard space horror gang: the trusted leader who is actually the primary antagonist, but forgot; the young mechanic with a wife back home who just wants to make it out alive; the jabbering foreigner who is physically fit but otherwise useless; the German girl with glistening oil spread liberally over her person; and the crazy old black guy who just wants to kill everyone and eat them. Performances range from okay (the leads) to abysmal (bit-parts and voiceovers – the voiceovers are especially bad).

The film moves quickly enough, but it doesn’t engage on any level, so it feels lethargic and hollow. Unsure of how to proceed, the film smash-cuts out of scenes it can’t properly finish, giving a stilted, unfinished feel to the narrative. Its focus is always in question – is it about Pandorum? Is it about the monsters? Is it about the ship, the planet, the crew? – and the twisted ending shocks only with its inanity.

I feel obliged to touch on the production design, even though you don’t care. The typeface used throughout this film, in computer consoles and on bulkhead doors, looks like the kind of thing that would impress a 13-year-old designing his first spaceship. It’s distracting and stupid. Likewise the design of blades in the film: they’re all curved and shiny and sleek and useless. The incongruity of their design leaps out of the screen and grabs the viewer by the shoulders and screams “LOOK HOW FREAKING AWESOME I LOOK, DON’T I LOOK AWESOME?” 13-year-olds might find you awesome, yes, but you don’t look very useful. I remember a time when blades used to just be sharp bits of metal. Those were the days, when you could stab a man and not worry about bloodying the fancy design of your weapon.

Where was I? Oh, yes. Right from the start of Pandorum, I felt a creeping sense of déjà vu. As the film progressed, the sense grew stronger, and stronger, until it became an overriding axiom of truth in my brain: Pandorum is exactly like a video game, but with all the gameplay removed.

Video game cutscenes are notoriously bad. It’s like game designers feel obliged to tack some kind of narrative onto the game, to string the gameplay sequences together, so they plumb the depths of cinema for a suitable story and then rip it off wholesale. The result is a patchy, directionless series of animated scenes that clumsily provides exposition, character beats, and monster introductions; nobody really pays attention to them, because they’re usually awful.

The scene where this realisation crystallised for me in Pandorum was when protagonist Bower witnessed a group of monsters scuttling away in the distance. At this point in a video game, after teasing the enemy’s presence, the game would then give control back to the player, leaving you to walk through pitch-black corridors with nothing but a torch and the pause button for protection. Sooner or later, the game would start throwing enemies at the player, and you’d have to fend them off, and it would all be very exciting and make up for the shitty cinematic that preceded it.

But Pandorum cuts from cinematic to cinematic, skipping over the meat in between, the bits that actually provide the entertainment. The protganonist experiences extreme amnesia (a common device in video game storytelling), and receives orders mainly via radio, a mechanic used so frequently in gaming that it’s become something of a joke. Further, the story takes place mostly in corridors – that hallowed staple of uninspired video game design – and the action scenes play like a series of boss fights without the sense of challenge or reward; there’s even a scene  dedicated to the sacred video game action of acquiring your first weapon; the list of similarities goes on.

It’s a sad world in which one of the more parasitic media of storytelling – video games – feeds back into the medium it’s leeching off. Pandorum plays like Event Horizon via Dead Space, or Aliens via Resident Evil. The result is a dull, lifeless shell of a film, familiar in trappings but alien in soul.

Pandorum