"Pandorum" Tries to Be Different and Succeeds... in a Very Bad Way

Imagine an Alien rip-off. (You don't really need to- there are tons.) Now, imagine that the rip-off has the plot of Fight Club, the camera work of The Blair Witch Project or Cloverfield, and the strange and convoluted editing of Memento. Sound unique? It is. This film had two possible directions it could go: revitalization of the Sci-Fi thriller or total ruin. Guess what? It took the latter approach.

The plot is this: the destruction of the planet earth has driven the last humans to insanity, forcing them to lock each other up in rooms and cannibalize each other until they evolve into bloodthirsty monsters. Some of the last members of the crew wake up in hypersleep to discover the process and try to stop it.

The problem here isn't with the script, which was rather well written by Travis Milloy, a newcomer to the big Hollywood scene. The problem lies instead in just about everything else.

Director Christian Alvart is new to big-budget Hollywood as well, and he brings many of his low budget tricks here with him. One of these tricks, a classic in the horror and action genres, is quick cutting between extreme camera angles. This makes the action seem more furious and chaotic, when in reality it is quite tame. Here's the problem: the action isn't quite tame. The action in this film is furiously paced, and the monsters could be genuinely frightening if we could see them for more than a tenth of a second at a time. I realize that this is a ship and the corridors are tight and cramped, but that shouldn't change the fact that this is the 21st century, where we have CGI that can make anything look real enough with a big enough budget. This film certainly had a big enough budget to use a simple tracking camera or at least make the action easily followable. In fact, the action sequences were so difficult to comprehend that I found myself skipping to the next chapter and skipping back to the action in order to understand who survived. This was a frustrating and painful process.

The next problem that the film suffers from is really bad editing, whenever a scene gets truly interesting, we're whisked away with a "meanwhile" type scene, usually one that doesn't even matter to the story. I believe that this is a great example of a film  that was ruined in post-production, as even the camera work wouldn't have been as annoying had some thought been put into the editing.

Overall, Pandorum is a tragedy. It is a surprisingly unique script that was ruined by everything else. Only see this if you want to be depressed, as this is bad, but not bad enough to be funny.

Overall Grade: D