Pandorum

Like I suspected, we have another Event Horizon on our hands. And a little mix of Blade II. The real question is, is what we are watching real? We had to ask ourselves the same question as we did in the 1980's blockbuster Total Recall.

3:10 to Yuma's Ben Foster stars in this movie as Bower. The movie begins with him coming alive out of a deep sleep in some space ship. The space ship seems small at first but it is later revealed throughout the movie progress to be a massive vessel. He is a single soul on this ship, he does not know where the ship is headed or how to contact anyone. Help comes when Lt. Payton pops out of his honey comb. This is Dennis Quaid's new movie, it is a far cry from Any Given Sunday.

This plot is mindnumbing and I can not even figure it out after close scrutinization. Bower and Payton begin to work together to attempt to turn the ship around and/regain control of the ship. They believe they are in the outer stretches of the milky way and as far as they know, they may be. Bower is sent to try to connect wires in tight fits and spots and soon begins to see dead bodies. He is doing this with communicaton and help from Payton. Then it gets worse, there is a nasty creature on the ship. It is fast and lethal. Soon, it is known they have little moral character. They are not alone and this creature has many friends. It is a humanoid creature, barbaric, they sleep together, all bunched up, sort of reminescent like the Aliens did in that movie.

Bower makes a few friends, one of them is Antje Traue who plays Nadia. She and three guys fight with these humanoids in several brutal encounters. They do not know each other that well but they must work together as a team if they want to survive.

While they are engaging this seriously athletic enemy that equal the strength of five men. The top fighters in this nasty race seem to have the strength of a Predator but could be quicker and faster, which says alot. Bad ass Never Back Down's Cam Gigandet appears as Gallo. He seems to be some sort of psychiatrist but what actually happens is he is Payton. They are one in the same. This aspect is never really explained but that is typical in many movies now. I do not like it since everyone who sees it has a different opinion on what actually occurs. It would be a novelty if a movie actually explains itself. This part of the movie, with Payton and Gallo, is a farce, everything else was actually occuring. Payton is suffering from a pandorum episode. This is a condition that can occur in space that compels someone to hallucinate and can push them to become crazy.

Payton, apparently, has been playing God. This movie occurs about 150 years in the future and Earth is struggling. There is about 24 billion people on this planet by the looks at the final scene, they have been wiped off the surface of the planet. I am not sure how.

Payton and Bower come to a conclusion that if they can rejuvenate the nuclear reactor on the space ship, they can return home. The movie hints that Earth has been destroyed by something massive, or a stunning event. But this turns out to not be true.

Bower has and adventure and with Nadia, they eventually fight their way back to the bridge and then they have to fight a lunatic Payton. These disgusting creatures used to be humans but they have evolved to survive the confines of the vessel. They live off humans who come to wake out of their space stupor, which is also known as a form hypermetabolic stasis. I was hoping these creatures would lay into Payton, his own invention, sort of, turning onto their helping creator. But this does not occur, the water pressure gets him and the surviving creatures. Most of these humanoid beasts are incinerated with the nuclear reactor is revived. But some make it to the bridge to be devasted by the pressure of the water. That is right, this ship was never in outer space, it somehow crash landed in the ocean with the bridge being pounded into the sediment.

Bower and Nadia hop into an escape pod and they shoot to the surface very quickly. This movie did not want to discuss what would occur to a human who ascends in water rapidly, it is called the bends and it is a terrible way to perish. OK, the good side wins, ofcourse some are killed in the chaos. One by Payton himself after he survived many battles with the deranged creatures.

Soon after their pod shoots up out of the water, about 70 other pods do the same. I guess life can not return to Earth. Hopefully Barnie Frank is not recreated. This movie has life, it is a thriller. There is not any wasted scene that I can illustrate. Payton and Bower, the scenes just bounce off of them throughout the movie. The battle that the struggling humans have with these amazing but horrendous creatures are passionate and enduring. But, the movie did lack some humor and copied too many scenes from previous science fiction productions. I saw Aliens, Predator, and a few others in this film. I do not care if it was made based on the book, the producer borrowed ideas from those movies and tossed them into this one. The idea and script and ending were satisfying though. It was not better than Surrogates, its main rival though.

I allocate this movie three stars.***