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I saw Pandorum a couple of weeks ago during its opening weekend.  There had been a lot of hype about this movie traveling around the web over the past several months, so I was excited to finally see it and I wasn’t disappointed.  While Pandorum is in no way a ground-breaking movie, it was still a lot of fun and felt like it had learned from prior flixs in the genre.  Beth Accomando, from KPBS, really nailed it when she said that Pandorum is Alien meets The Descent.

***Spoiler Alert***

The story opens like so many other space-horror flixs have in the past with the primary protagonist waking up out of some sort of hyper-sleep. Some examples of other movies that have used this exact opening are Alien and Pitch Black.  The kicker here is that Pandorum is psychological condition a person who has been in hyper-sleep can enter soon after waking up. The way I understood it, some individuals are driven into this homicidal state by the long-term sleep.

The short short version of the story is that Ben Foster’s character, Bower, wakes up and has no memory of where, who, or what he is doing (an effect of the hyper-sleep). His commanding officer, played by Dennis Quaid, wakes up after Bower and they quickly figure out they need to stabilize the ships power supply. As the movie moves along Bower discovered more and more about what has actually been going on over the past several months on board the ship by discovering large hoards of mutants, running into several human survivors, and having the occasional flashback.  The small band of survivors attempt to get the ship fixed, so they can eventually make it to their destination. Like I mentioned before it’s a pretty straight forward plot (and in no way original), but the execution was good. However, I thought that towards the end the plot got a little strange and felt a little forced. I can say that I didn’t see the final scene coming, so that was a big plus for me.

Unfortunately, the movie has not done well at the box office and has met some mixed reviews.  I think this is unfortunate because I really enjoy this type of movie and seeing a decent one fail this badly (so far it has lost about $30,000,000) means we probably won’t be seeing many more any time in the near future or they will not be given a large enough budget to make them visually exciting.

I’m giving Pandorum three and 1/2 out of five stars.  *** 1/2

Next post, I’ll be commenting on the Legion’s Top 5 list of science fiction/horror movies.  The actual Top 5 list will be podcast as Episode 65 of The Legion of Lethargic Super-Geeks later this week.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 5:00 am and is filed under Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.