Thursday, January 11, 2024

Pandorum - 2009

 The year is 2009.  My ex-girlfriend and future ex-wife is really into Ben Foster.  We rent this movie because of him and watch it and everyone instantly forgets it ever existed the very next day.

There is an epidemic of movies that completely vanish from memory, and this is one of them.  It's some gritty super stylized space horror movie co-produced by Paul WS Anderson.  The guy who made Event Horizon goes for take 2 in this Sunshine/Event Horizon/Sphere/every other movie like this redux.  Also, the ship is called Elysium in a world where the movie Elysium came out 4 years later.

The aforementioned Ben Foster and Dennis Quaid star in the movie, where they wake up on a spaceship that seems to be empty at first until they discover there's crazy creatures living aboard and some renegade humans that are surviving ala Aliens.  Space madness took hold aboard the ship of course, and also some Firefly shit happened, cuz it gave birth to the same creatures.

The movie telegraphs everything that will happen for a lot of it, and the rest is middling, emphasized by very of-the-time style, effects, and grittiness.  Everything is covered in an oily gross liquid, and everyone is sweaty and ugly.  The characters do not have much depth, the ship apparently has endless rusty basements where someone can live, or pools of unknown liquids can coagulate.

Shot in confuso-vision, where you cannot tell what is happening half the time, and spoken almost entirely in spat out whispers, this movie is ridiculously of the time.  Also, this movie makes the weird common mistake of having characters name things...?  These guys get space madness, which they call Pandorum.  WHy would they call it Pandorum, exactly?  Its insanity.  They wouldn't randomly decide to name insanity after Pandora's Box.  Why would they do that?

In the end, its exactly what you might expect, and it certainly didn't require a rewatch.  If you want this type of thing, go watch Sunshine instead.

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