Pandorum (2009) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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Panacea, panache, pandemic, pandemonium, panel, pang, panic. Nope, no pandorum.

Pandorum is a horror/sci-fi mashup that creates a gigantic mystery on the first manned trip to a distant planet. Who’s responsible? What’s going on? What sort of creatures have invaded the ship? The answers are less impressive than the puzzle, leading to a film that feels less exciting at its conclusion than it does at the beginning.

First Impressions

The trailer reveals a gigantic spaceship 500 million miles from Earth. When two men awaken on it, they discover someone, or something, has wiped out most of the crew. It’s a fight for survival as things go horribly wrong in a place where there’s no help. Just who or what is Pandorum?

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

On the spaceship Elysium, Bower (Ben Foster), a technical engineer from team 5, awakens from hypersleep, disoriented and ill with memory loss. Looking around the darkened ship, he finds a tube with Payton (Dennis Quaid), also from team 5, whom he frees from hypersleep as well. They head toward the bridge but become stuck in the anteroom just outside the door, unable to raise anyone from team 4 on the bridge. The ship is mostly powered down, with sporadic power surges indicating a problem with the reactor. Bower chooses to go investigate, hopping into the overhead ductwork.

Bower makes it to a locker area but loses communication with Payton. He finds the corpse of Cooper, another of his teammates, whose empty hypersleep chamber he saw when awakening. Bower sees a shadowy figure, which he follows, leading him to an apparent trap containing the top half of a person hung by ropes in the hallway. He is attacked by a woman with a large knife, who runs off when some other mutated humanoid appears and chases Bower back to the lockers. The mutant takes the desiccated body of Cooper. Bower has a flashback to his time as a child when the televised discovery of another Earth-like planet, Tanis, was broadcast. He also recalls his wife and realizes he needs to find her as well.

Bower finds a non-lethal riot gun and reestablishes contact with Payton, who describes pandorum, the insanity of space, by recalling the events of 5,000 people killed on board the Eden. Bower discovers another survivor, Shepard (Norman Reedus), who is paranoid, rubbing motor oil on himself before getting attacked by fast and feral creatures. Bower then runs into a Vietnamese man, Mahn (Cung Le), who speaks little to no English. They encounter Nadia (Antje Traue), the woman who attacked Bower earlier. She leads them back to her pod in the biological samples section, where she explains that the ship is a Noah’s Ark bound for Tanis.

Meanwhile, Payton discovers a naked man in a crawl space near him who appears to have just come out of hypersleep, Gallo (Cam Gigandet). He says he was previously on the bridge, but no one is there anymore. A group of mutants breaks into the biology area and chases after Bower, Manh, and Nadia, killing and eating another man who awakens during the moment. They run into a silo where they meet Leland (Eddie Rouse), a cook who’s gone insane. Nadia has some ideas that the mutants might have been created by the synthetic enzyme used in the hypersleep feeding tubes, which was supposed to help them adapt to life on Tanis. However, it may have adapted people to the ship, instead.

Leland drugs the three, having become a cannibal since his awakening a while ago. He explains what he knows of the history of the ship, while at the same time, Gallo explains to Payton that pandorum infected the other two bridge officers, and he had to kill them. Bower manages to convince Leland that if the reactor is not restarted soon, they will all be blown up. Leland agrees to go with them to assist. At the reactor chamber, the walkway collapses, and Bower falls into a space below where an entire village of mutants is sleeping. He covers himself in slime and offal to disguise his scent and sneaks back up the control panel to restart the reactor, just in time. The nuclear fire kills most of the mutants, but a few still survive and come after them.

Manh is killed when he refuses to attack what appears to be a child mutant. In return, the small creature slices his throat. The doors to the bridge open with the power coming back on, and the character of Gallo merges with Payton, revealing he was only a manifestation of his subconscious–Payton was Gallo all along, having suffered pandorum and killed the bridge crew. He had put himself back into hypersleep and reemerged as an older man. Nadia and Bower make it to the bridge and open the shutters, revealing that the ship is actually underwater on Tanis. They crashed and have been asleep for over 800 years. Bower shoots at a mutant, but knocks a piece from a control panel loose, which cracks the glass. He and Nadia jump into a hypersleep tube as he ejects all the remaining survivors. Payton/Gallo is drowned as 1,213 pods bob to the surface of the lake on the new home planet of the human race.

“We were meant to go on. And we were meant to survive.” – Nadia

History in the Making

On first blush, Pandorum looks to be a sci-fi/horror film mashup like Event Horizon. A doomed crew, stranded on a vessel in deep space, facing an unknown and deadly enemy. It’s all that, plus a solid mix of science-fiction elements and horror tropes, wrapped up in a weird package. Opening with a flyby of the spaceship Elysium, homaging the opening images from Star Wars, Pandorum plants itself firmly in science fiction territory. But it’s not long before the horror vibes of creepy noises, dark shadows, and the unknown begin to take hold. Primarily, it’s an exploration of the feelings associated with memory loss and paranoia. It creates a disorienting feeling with the audience, keeping the viewer off balance in a similar way to the way Bower and Payton are feeling. Unfortunately, when the film is over, there’s not much left to think about–except maybe what a weird film this was. Knowing the end of the film and what’s going on might make things a little easier to understand in a rewatch, but only a little bit.

The whole film is basically an enigma going in. The trailer gives a general sense that this is a horrific science-fiction film where things have gone catastrophically wrong, like so many other films that have come before it, but there’s no sense of what may set this apart from other, similar films. Firstly, the title–Pandorum–is not a real word. It sounds like it might be a derivative of Pandora, a Greek myth about a woman who opened a box and released all the evils into the world. There’s an argument to be made that the film does follow a similar path to that myth. Humanity, in its attempt to save itself, creates a new evil that further decimates the species. The film explains that the word is a slang term for ODS (Orbital Dysfunctional Syndrome), which is the biological side effect of flying in deep space. The symptoms are tremors, paranoia, delirium, and nosebleeds, as the recipient begins a downward spiral into madness. This madness can also be fed by the side effects of hypersleep, which often include memory loss. Gallo (who later assumes the name Payton) appears to be the first person on the Elysium to experience pandorum, killing the rest of the bridge crew. That may have been the event that led the ship to eventually crash into Tanis, or it may have occurred later. Bower appears to be having a similar breakdown throughout the film, but the audience is never really sure. His hallucination on the bridge at the end of the film, where he sees a mutant, but when he shoots at it, all that exists is a control panel, seems to suggest he also had pandorum. However, surprise, the ship was never in space, and Bower never had the nosebleeds that plagued Payton, so his visions may have only been stress-induced and not actual ODS.

Genre-fication

Having reviewed Interstellar (2014) just before 31 Days of Horror began this year, it seems like Pandorum could be the dark sequel to that film. Having discovered a world light-years away that can support human life, a world-ship is launched, allowing mankind to make a fresh start. The audience learns that not all of humanity made the trip. For example, Bower’s wife decided to stay behind. Thousands of people did decide to make the trip on a ship that contained biological samples of thousands of Earth organisms, a veritable Noah’s Ark, as Nadia describes it. But unlike the hopeful nature of Interstellar, where humanity gets another chance at survival, Pandorum feels dark and cynical. Even though the end of the film shows the survivors’ capsules popping out of the water on Tanis, the film gives the impression of being the worst possible start to colonizing a new world. On a 123-year journey, something goes wrong, the ship crashes, a large portion of the passengers become feral and cannibalistic mutants, and 800 more years go by before people are awakened on the new planet.

The sci-fi aspects of the film soon take a backseat to the horror elements. With the backstory of the reason for the mission being told later in flashbacks, as characters remember it, the film starts cold with Bower awakening. He doesn’t know what’s going on, and neither does the audience. We may have a bit more detail, knowing that he’s on a ship and something is not going as planned, but it’s not too much. It’s dark, the lights flicker, and shadows seem to move. It’s the cold open to Saw. Who are we? Where are we? What’s going on? Soon, the film introduces things in the darkness. Fast things. Are they aliens, mutants, or something else? It’s a bit of a fast-zombie movie as these creatures outmaneuver Bower and the others. But the film also puts the terror in the relationships of the characters. Payton encounters Gallo, a crazy man, who seems like he can’t be trusted. Bower and his group encounter Leland, another person who has also lost his marbles. The audience surrogate characters are suddenly in jeopardy, and that makes everything tense. Of course, Leland ends up getting convinced to help out, while the Payton/Gallo relationship goes the other way, with Gallo being only a figment of the crazy mind of Payton. It’s one of the few times that an unreliable narrator-type character appears in a horror film. The conclusion of the film also feels pulled from horror’s greatest hits, with the ship being on Tanis the entire time. The time jump, where it’s been nearly a millennium longer than the characters believe it to be, is so much like the killer making the call from inside the house. They’ve been in here all the time!

Societal Commentary

Unlike traditional science-fiction films with clear social commentary about the world and humanity, Pandorum seems more interested in making a film that deliberately puts the audience on its back foot. It’s purposefully confusing and obtuse to create the same feeling in the viewer that Bower is feeling. It may do this too well, as there are several moments where things are too unclear and questionable. Without the ability to stop and rewind, viewers in a cinema may have gotten completely lost. Even though the overall story of the Elysium and its crew is one of salvation, the film makes that journey into the unknown about fear and paranoia. It removes the hopefulness of the trip and replaces it with hopelessness. As mentioned above, even though at the end of the film 1,213 people survived to begin their lives anew on Tanis, it doesn’t seem like an easy prospect. The audience has only caught their breath, and it certainly feels like there’s a long, hard road ahead.

Yet, the characters persevere. Nadia’s quote above is the most hopeful thing in the entire film. As with Interstellar, which leaves audiences with the key line that mankind may have been born on Earth, but was never meant to die here, Pandorum offers a small modicum of light in a really, really dark film. At the point in the film where that quote comes from, Nadia’s talking about her and Bower fighting off the fatigue and continuing with their difficult trip to the reactor. If they don’t make it, everyone dies. But her line is also about humanity as a whole. That perseverance and strength that the human race has to endure, adapt, and continue regardless of the obstacles. And adapt humanity does. Just in weird and unexpected ways, turning into feral, cannibalistic mutants.

The Science in The Fiction

Pandorum introduces an interesting weapon for fighting the mutants. Bower finds a non-lethal anti-riot gun, which can “do some damage” up close. It seems like a useful tool for a spacecraft since it fires no projectiles that could accidentally damage the hull. It appears to fire a pulse of compressed air or a sonic shockwave that can incapacitate an opponent. With the mutants, however, it doesn’t seem to slow them down much. The first time Bower fires it at a creature, it’s pretty close range, yet it appears to do nothing. The editing is pretty choppy around this sequence, but in rewatching the moment, it’s due to a window being between him and the creature. It doesn’t blow out the glass (or plexi) and just seems to bounce off without harm. At the end of the film, Bower and Nadia are squeezing through a doorway onto the bridge when a mutant sticks its head through the gap. Bower fires from inches away, obliterating the creature’s head and leaving a fine spray of blood all over himself. Quite a different reaction, and certainly a terminal blow should this be used on normal, everyday rioters.

The film makes a case for humanity needing to leave the planet due to overpopulation. The opening text cards depict the exponential growth of human technology and its population, starting in 1969 when man landed on the moon. At that time, the population was only 3.6 billion. This is a real statistic from human history, as is the next card from 2009 (the year the film was released) lauding the launch of the Kepler space telescope, where the world population at 6.76 billion. The film moves into conjecture for the next two time points. In 2153, the year Tanis is discovered, the population is listed at 24.34 billion. That is followed by a card for 2174, the year that Elysium was launched, which lists no population, but indicates that the “battle for Earth’s limited resources reaches its boiling point.” The whole reason for the space mission and humanity moving away from the planet is explained simply: there’s a finite amount of resources that can no longer support the population. It would have been nice to get a little more of this aspect into the film, as the characters begin to remember their past.

The Final Frontier

Some of the worst parts of the film come from its editing. At its best, editing is often invisible, being used to add layers of clarity in scenes. But here in Pandorum, the editing is often jarring and used as a way to add confusion to a scene, sometimes purposefully, but sometimes it appears that was not the intent. As Bower discovers the locker room and sees the mutants for the first time, short shots of the creature are edited into the sequence, making an unsettling moment even worse. But those editing choices lead to confusion about the woman he sees and where she goes. The mutant comes for Bower, and appears to get him, but quickly we realize that he’s fine, and it was a corpse that the creature stole. It’s eventually explained, but that initial confusion (whether on purpose or not) can lead audiences to getting pulled out of the film, losing the flow of their suspension of disbelief.

Visually, Pandorum has some interesting cinematography in it, which makes up for some of the other issues with the film. Due to the lack of power and lighting, many scenes are lit by glow-rods. They are often green, but scenes also show up bathed in red and blue light as well. Having watched many older 1960s horror films, these shots have the feeling of some of the Roger Corman Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, which utilize odd color overlays on particularly stressful or maddening scenes. Pandorum provides an intense and unsettling experience on the first watch. It’s the mysterious haunted house in space overrun with zombies, where no one can remember how they got there. Unfortunately, some of the anxiety created on the first viewing is no longer there on the second time around, leaving audiences scratching their heads on why things happened the way they did.

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