The great irony of this picture is that if it had only dumped the concept of Pandorum itself, it would have worked not just better but well. You see, if you dig underneath all the overly gothic settings and the space madness (i.e., Pandorum) garbage, you’ll actually find a pretty cool seed ship story. To make this easy, when I refer to the movie, I’ll use Pandorum. When I refer to the space madness, I’ll use Pandorum.

Here’s the deal. By the late twenty-second century, Earth’s population has maxed out. We’ve bloated up to around fifty billion. Humanity’s finished. We’ve blown it. Wasted our resources. Poisoned the biosphere past the point of no return. Life as we understand it cannot continue. Our last chance is the colony ship Elysium, carrying about sixty thousand humans in suspended animation to the newly discovered habitable planet Tanis. We’re never told exactly where Tanis is, but we know it’s going to take about one hundred twenty years to get there.

The story starts with Corporal Bowers (Ben Foster), a ship’s officer, being abruptly awakened from stasis. It’s a painful process, involving hissing steam, alarm bells, the pulling of tubes out of veins, the peeling off of adhesive strips of gelatinous pseudo-skin, plus a great deal of hacking, coughing, and heaving.

Something has gone wrong. Protocol requires that crewmen are not to be awakened without bridge crew from the current rotation being there to help out. The ship is run in three-man shifts, with each shift lasting two years. Every two years a fresh trio of flight officers is awakened, and the current three go back to sleep.

Bower, despite the fact he is suffering from hyper-space memory loss (common, we are informed, to all travelers in stasis; convenient, too, as it turns out), realizes quickly enough that the ship’s computer has awakened him on its own initiative. Why? Because there is a problem with the nuclear reactor. The ship is being shaken by violent power surges every few minutes—an indication of the reactor’s rapidly worsening instability.

Bower tries to open the exit doors to the awakening chamber’s locker room and reach the bridge, but main power is out. He’s trapped. A second crewman, a commissioned officer—Lieutenant Payton (Dennis Quaid) is suddenly auto-awakened. The pod for the third crewman of Bower’s shift—Cooper—is, hmmm, empty.

Payton and Bower come up with a plan. Bower will climb up through the air shafts and then down into the bridge, then open the door from the other side.

This, needless to say, goes haywire; Bower becomes disoriented in a massive tangle of cables, plummets down a steeply slanted shaft, and lands in one of the ship’s main corridors—far from the bridge. Along the way, he also finds the desiccated corpse of Cooper, who had evidently been awakened earlier and tried to get out on his own.

Bower wanders into the darkened labyrinth of the ship, trying to get his bearings. He eventually encounters Nadia (Antje Traue), a beautiful, leather-vested, poly-accented Milla Jovovich clone. As one now expects in films of this ilk, Nadia kicks Bower’s ass, pins him to the ground in a suitably provocative position, then disappears just as the real bad guys show up. That would be the inevitable mutated humanoid creatures—pale-skinned, gaping mawed super-carnivores strongly reminiscent of the morphed “survivors” in 2007’s I am Legend and the cave dwellers in 2005’s The Descent. Let’s borrow from Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky and call these bad boys “muties.”

Nadia and Bower reconnect a bit further on. In one of those delicious coincidences that B and B-minus flicks depend upon, Nadia is in reality one of the ship’s genetic scientists. She’s not exactly sure why she was awakened, or when. But she’s well aware of the muties and even has a theory as to how they came to be. The ship was programmed to—as the voyage neared its end—add a mutagenic accelerator to the hibernating colonists’ intravenous medical support fluid. This agent was designed to biologically prepare the colonists to rapidly evolve to fit Tanis’s atmosphere and gravity. It was understood that baseline humans would need to alter in some ways to breathe the air and eat the flora and fauna.

Nadia believes that the ship began adding the accelerator to the stasis pods as scheduled-but that the ship either flew past its destination or stopped midway there. In short, too much time has elapsed. The accelerator has done its job—at least on some of the hibernators. But the colonists haven’t been released onto Tanis’s surface for the necessary evolution to take place. Instead, they have evolved to life—as predators—on the Elysium.

You got all that?

Bower and Nadia now meet Manh (MMA middleweight champion Cung Le), a native human who speaks no recognizable language, and who, while not physically changed like the muties, has certainly adapted in more traditional ways to life aboard the ship. He carries handmade weapons—a curved sword, a spear—and dresses in rude clothing. After some obligatory spin-kicking and futuristic dagger thrusting, these three decide to join forces.

With Payton’s radio-transmitted help, they make a desperate bid to reach the reactor— where Bower will “reset” its controls (whatever that means)—before it’s too late.

You’re wondering, of course, what any of this has to do with Pandorum, and what, in fact, Pandorum is. Well, I can’t really explain it to you—not, at least, based on the little I figured out from the film itself. What do they actually tell us in the film? That it’s hyper space madness, of course—brought on by, umm, yep, being in space too long. Symptoms? Shaking hands. Double vision. Paranoia. Homicidal rage. The usual.

Does Pandorum even matter? No, not really. Oh, it explains why the ship has ended up where it is. Why things have gotten so desperate. And why the colonists have been freed manually from their pods at various times. But it’s so poorly developed, it’s hard to care—even in the flick’s final Fight Clubbish showdown. This, incidentally, is where Twilight heartthrob Cam Gigandet shows up. Or does he?

Pandorum’s generation or seed ship story is strong. The notion of something going wrong on a centuries-spanning voyage is always intriguing. German director Christian Alvart has a classical eye for action and a firm grasp of gothic conventions (though even I got a bit tired of all those shadows, all those Victorian Age iron girders and boiler plates, and—you guessed it—all that dripping water). But he glosses over too much on the one hand and overstates on the other. Not giving us Manh’s origin was a serious blunder. He had to have come from a tribe of primitive humans living somewhere on board. That’s important. How is it even possible? Where do they live? What do they eat? Why is Manh now alone?

If insanity has to be the cause of the ship’s fate, so be it, but make it individual, not some sort of ill-defined “condition” that could also be afflicting other characters, causing us to doubt their credibility. Not, at the very least, without providing more substance to it.

That said, if you ignore the Pandorum angle and focus on the core idea—the seed ship and where it might be—the film works. I liked that part of the movie. The performances are uniformly routine—except for Cung Le’s Manh, which is simple and physical, refreshingly no frills. The score, by Michl Britsch, is both eerie and electrifying. Trevor Milloy’s script stumbles around blindly in the fog created by Pandorum—especially in the unfortunate Quaid-Gigandet sequences—but regains its footing nicely when it switches to Bowers, Nadia, and Manh and their on-the-run battle with the ravenous muties.

If you like generation or seed ship stories, see this one.

Sure, it has its share of flaws. But for a deep SF fan, it’s worth a peek.

And, folks, it’s got one helluva closing shot.

Pandorum
Constantin Film Produktion
U.S. Release Date:September 25, 2009
Director: Christian Alvart
Screen writer:Travis Milloy
Running Time: 108 minutes