Deep space requires no work to be made terrifying. It’s already the most hostile environment before considering the risk of deadly aliens. As life-changing as it must be to experience the pale blue dot from orbit, the void could drive a person mad after a while. Christian Alvart’sPandorumasks; what if the final hope for humanity lost its mind in the blackness of space and threatened to wipe itself out?
Director Christian Alvart came up in film journalism before making his film debut in 1999. His English-language debut wasCase 39, which premiered a few days beforePandorumin New Zealand. He’s remained in his native Germany ever since. Streaming entertainment ensuredeasy distribution of foreign art, allowing hisDogs of Berlinto become a minor success worldwide. His thrillers and horror films aren’t anyone’s favorites, but he’s a unique talent.
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What isPandorumabout?
Pandorumis a fictional nickname for the effects of Orbital Dysfunctional Syndrome, a form of emotional breakdown that affects astronauts on long voyages. The 60,000 passengers on theElysiumare on a 123-year odyssey to escape the ruined Earth and colonize a planet called Tanis. The people aboardare kept in cryosleep, save for a rotating crew of maintenance workers who are woken up every two years to check on the vessel. Bower and Payton, two crew members, wake unexpectedly. Being pulled out of cryosleep without warning causes psychological and mental struggles, leaving Bower and Payton without memories. The nuclear reactor is unstable, and the bridge is inaccessible. They soon discover a disinterred corpse and a mortally wounded mechanic. It’s up to Bower and Payton to learn why they woke up and what they’resharing theElysiumwith.
Bower is chased by a mass of cannibalistic humanoids who seem to have torn the ship apart. He meets Nadia and Manh, who are initially hostile but willing to band together to survive. They find Leland, a cook who survived off cast-off water, moss, and human flesh. Payton encounters a dangerous man named Gallo, who lets him know theElysiumis lost in space, and he killed his maintenance team in self-defense. Bower slowly pushes toward madness, realizing that his wife and everyone he ever loved died on Earth while they were in stasis. Leland explains that Gallo awoke dozens of passengers and goaded them into the violent, cannibalistic culture they currently enact. He returned to hypersleep, leaving them to evolve into nightmarish mutants. Bower, Payton, Nadia, Leland, and Manh must struggle to survive and discover if all hope is truly lost.
Why doesPandorumwork?
When it comes to space horror cinema,Alienstill reigns supreme. It’s hard to find a scary movie set in space that doesn’t borrow a few notes from Ridley Scott’s masterpiece.Pandorumcertainly owes a debt to the lost crew of theNostromo, but it borrows from more than one film. It’s riffing onEvent HorizonandSunshineand the occasional zombie thriller. The most significantdifference is thatAlienis Gothic horror in a futuristic setting. It’s slow, haunting, meaningful, and deliberate.Aliendigs into its viewers' brains and lives there, changing how they look at dark hallways and open ceilings.Pandorumis relentless, oppressive, and overbearing. It doesn’t want to build an atmosphere. It creates a wall of sound and fury, then asks its heroes to maintain sanity.Alienis about being alone in the disquietingly silent void with something that lives to kill.Pandorumis about being drowned in violence and horror until everyone loses hope. Add an excellent performance by Ben Foster and an engaging unraveling story, and it’s a fun experience.
How doesPandorumend?
Bower faces death to restart theElysium’s reactor. The energy kills dozens of mutants. Manh spares a mutant child who quickly kills him. Payton creates a sedative to deal with the increasingly erratic Gallo. In their struggle, Payton discovers thathe’s been Gallo the whole time. When Gallo woke up with amnesia, he believed himself to be Payton, whom he killed some time ago. Gallo kills Leland with the sedative. He unveils the ship’s windows to Bower and Nadia, revealing the cold blackness of space without a star in sight. Bower loses himself as Gallo argues for the continuation of his primal society.
Nadia sees something glowing in the distance through the window. She reaches the computer, which tells her they’ve been on theElysiumfor 923 years. They crashed on Tanis 800 years ago. Bower suffers a violent hallucination and breaks a window, revealing that they have been at thebottom of the oceanfor eight centuries and flooding the vessel. Nadia drags Bower into a hypersleep pod as the ship enters emergency protocol. The 1,211 remaining pods are launched to the surface while Gallo and the mutants sink and drown. Bower and Nadia float to a lush tropical coastline while the other pods follow them.
Pandorumisn’t the best thought-out movie ever made, but it deserves much better than the harsh critical reception it received. Sure, it’s derivative,but it combines so many elementsand executes them so well that it becomes its own project.Pandorumis a nightmare worth revisiting. Let the horror of space take its toll.
