Dir. Christian Alvart, US/Germany, 2009, 108 mins
Cast: Dennis Quaid, Ben Foster
Review by Carol Allen
This film starts off with a very promising sci-fi idea, which is given to us during the opening titles. By 2174 the earth is wildly overpopulated and people are fighting each other for food. We get a quick flash of a crew in the control room of a space ship and then cut to first one man Payton (Quaid) and then another Bower (Foster) waking abruptly and traumatically from deep hyper sleep with no memory of why they're there. As Bower explores the ship under radio direction from Payton, his senior officer, they and rather more quickly we work out that the space ship is a "Noah's Ark", taking the last survivors of humanity to colonise a new planet.
However the film has some major problems. It's shot in deep darkness throughout, making it really difficult to see what's going on. This is made even worse by the trendy fast editing, which gives us no time to take in the image we've just glimpsed in the gloom nor indeed to get any idea the geography of the ship. The sound is so overlaid with weird music and noises that it overwhelms the actors' often muzzy enunciation and badly recorded dialogue, so that particular path to understanding what's going on is also blocked. And as you can't see or hear the actors and get involved in their predicament, you don't really care.
One can however just about get the gist. While prowling around the ship Bower comes across a handful of other humans, including a girl fetchingly dressed in black leather (Antje Traue), whose German accent makes her even more difficult to hear - she's the ship's biologist we finally deduce from one scene where they actually turn the lights on for a few moments - and there are a couple of other men. They all appear to have a common enemy, who is also on board - a race of pale, bald, sort of humanoid aliens with snarly fangs and a taste for human flesh. But rather than pulling together, for some incomprehensible reason this little band of humans spend a lot of time just beating the hell out of each other. That might be because one of them (Cung Le) is a martial arts champion and the film's makers wanted to get their moneysworth. Meanwhile Payton, who's still stuck in the area where he woke up, is having a pretty incomprehensible dialogue with a younger man (Cam Gigandet), who may or may not be his younger self from the early days of the voyage. The pandorum of the title by the way appears to be a sort of space sickness, which drives people mad. Not quite sure how I worked that one out. I must have managed to decipher a few sentences amongst the hullabaloo. And as for characterisation, forget it. Quaid and Foster are good actors but there's not a lot they can do with what they're given.
This is a very disappointing and frankly pretty terrible film. |
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