MOVIE REVIEW: Pandorum [sci-fi, horror]

Title: Pandorum
Genre: sci-fi, horror
Rating: R
Director: Christian Alvart
Writers: Travis Milloy (screenplay)
Stars: Dennis Quaid, Ben Foster, Cam Gigandet

Summary borrowed from IMDB: A pair of crew members aboard a spaceship wake up with no knowledge of their mission or their identities.

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If you like gritty sci-fi horror, then this movie is for you. A pretty slick trip into a future of horror, though the story is a little too good for simple popcorn fare. A great science fiction movie.

Amnesiac Bower (Ben Foster) wakes up in his stasis tube aboard the Elysium. Hypersleep can cause memory loss and a dangerous hallucination-laden mental state called Pandorum, amidst which other ships have had their commanders jettison the whole crew.

Upon waking, Bower is joined by Lieutenant Payton (Dennis Quaid) and they quickly discover that something is very wrong. The flight crews are supposed to be rotated over the course of their 123 year journey to Tanis. The rotation has been broken and no one has been maintaining the ship. They have no idea how long they’ve been asleep, and to top it all off they’re trapped in their crew berth, unable to access the bridge or its crew.

Desperate to gain control of the ship and discover what’s going on, Bower crawls through the innards of the ship in hopes of figuring out what’s happening. And that’s where everything really starts.

Featuring a hot chick with attitude, a Vietnamese agriculture worker that doesn’t seem to speak English, a crazy guy that just wants to survive, and a bunch of strange creatures that like to EAT people. Bower wonders how the creatures got on board the ship. He wonders if his family is somewhere in the family crew berths below or if they’re already dead. And to top it all off, the pulsating power outages can only mean that the ship’s reactor core is breaking down.

I really don’t want to ruin this movie for you, so I’ll just say this: watch it.

My rating: 4 stars.

I heard tell this was supposed to be the first in a trilogy of movies. I am super excited if they do it for reals.

For some reason, people brought the ratings of this movie down, but it was really very good. And if the second one focuses on Tanis… that would be the best thing ever. To actually see the start of a colony; it would be like a movie version of a CJ Cherryh book.

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