Eye Candy #41 - "Pandorum"

Pandorum: 150 years in the future, Earth is a dying planet, with a swollen population over 25 billion strong and dwindling resources to feed them all. The colony ship Elysium is launched into space with 60,000 passengers on a 120+ year mission to settle a new planet called Tanis. Flash forward, two crew men, Payton (Dennis Quaid) and Bower (Ben Foster) awaken from hyper-sleep with no knowledge of who or where they are. But something has definitely gone pear-shaped while they’ve been asleep. Other hyper-sleep tubes are broken, the nuclear reactor powering the ship is offline, no one can contact the bridge, and there are groups of animal-like creatures roaming the ship killing and eating people, while apparently normal humans are living a fringe existence. So Bower and Payton, as part of the flight crew, set out to restart the ship and figure out what the heckity-hoo is going on. In addition to that, Bower may also be coming down with pandorum, a madness brought on by hyper sleep that causes homicidal urges, and overall, not everything is as it seems. This is a bit of “Aliens” and “Alien3“, a bit of “Event Horizon”, a bit of this, a bit of that, yes, this is derivative. It’s also shot so dark, I had to watch it in a dark room just to see everything. Also, some of the special effects were distracting, like with jittery CGI (“make it happen fast enough for people not to be able to tell what the heck they saw!”). That being said, I found it watchable, and the plot while a bit complicated, was interesting enough (though I had to have some outside help to get the full synopsis of what all was happening). It’s essentially a chase picture, but lots of movies are chase pictures. It’s not “2001”, but it’s average and I‘ve certainly seen worse. Woodchuck sez, “Maybe sorta worth a look.”