“Pandorum”: The problems of identity-swapping on a spaceship filled with psychotic mutants, when the destination planet looks nice
The sci-fi Lovecraft-like horror film “Pandorum” (2009) is controversial in the concept that it tries to execute, and even in its history. In the 1990s German director Christian Alvart had written a screenplay “Nowhere” in which prisoners are exported to another planet and mutiny. Then Travis Milloy wrote a story with a similar plot with ordinary evacuees from Earths and a name based on the destination planet called Tanis. The ideas were combined and greenlit in the 2000’s and the result is this 2009 film from Germany for western audiences, distributed by Overture Films in NA and Summit internationally. This is how genre stuff (especially a “Noah’s Ark” story) gets made.
The film could be compared to “Passengers” (2016, reviewed here Dec. 23, 2016).
The film opens with Bower (Ben Foster) awakening from hypersleep, with layers of skin feeling off around the electrodes (no body hair left), and not remembering who he is. Soon, on this huge spaceship called Elysium, he encounters Payton (Dennis Quaid), also with amnesia. As they wander the spaceship, they encounter dangers, leading to roving bands of mutant zombies with spikes who practice cannabalism. They also encounter Manh (Cung Le) and especially Leland (Eddie Rouse), as well as Nadia (Antje Traue) who relate in pieces what had happened. The history of earth is shown in cave-like drawings and the duo learn that they had gotten a symbol that Earth had been destroyed several hundred years before.
The spaceship seems like a warehouse with no real internal geography. There thousands of pods for suspended people, and pits into which the mutants have fallen to scavenge. There is a “bridge” and a subway with what looks like tracks but never any trains. The command bridge itself still is relatively unscathed and is a white space.
As the film progresses, we learn that “pandorum” is a bizarre mental illness called orbital dysfunctional syndrome (not in the DSM) . Payton, we learn, had been murdered by the current character actually Gallo, who has changed identity because he had gone to sleep in Payton’s pod. It’s like doing a home invasion and becoming the person who lived there (I think the novel and movie “Burnt Offerings” from 1976 had a concept like that). Yet, in the ensuing melees, a young version of Gallo (Cam Gigandet) appears. This is a bit confusing. Apparently the young Gallo is like an apparition (as in Hamlet or other Shakespeare) from his own memory. Gallo insists that in the world they have, the only moral system possible is fascism and survival of the fittest; that is they only way any culture at all can survive and be reborn. That’s an existential problem: liberty and democracy mean individual risk in unwanted attentions.
We see the outside of the spaceship (finally) and it looks like the Bootes Void. Soon we see sea creatures, and we realize the spaceship has been at the bottom of the ocean for centuries. The fact that gravity has been relatively normal throughout the movie should have been a clue (there was no rotating device to produce artificial gravity).
When Nadia and Bower climb into an ejection pod, and are fired like a missile from a submarine, the emerge near a shore with hundreds of other pods with people who survived. The planet, slightly smaller in gravity, looks like Venus before it had its own catastrophe almost a billion years ago. Earlier, a child character relates seeing previews of what the garden and desert planet would look like. Finally there is geography again.
The DVD has shorts “The World of Elysium: Behind the Scenes” where the director explains the moral concepts of building an evacuation spaceship and the parallels to earth, that individual freedom is reduced when resources are finite. He hints, in a film made a decade ago, at the source of fascist and far-right belief systems.
There are two reduced aspect shorts, “What Happened to Nadia’s Team”, which shows the makeup routines in the studios for the actors, especially the mutants, and a “Flight Team Training Video” for the crew before it left Earth. There are also many deleted and alternate scenes which, if included, would make the film run about 125 minutes (the DVD as is runs 108, a theatrical version ran 94). This is a complicated film and plot which would be hard for a studio reviewer to read had it come from outside the established industry; the identity exchange is hard to portray clearly in a screenplay.
I remember back in the 1980s that a computer operator where I worked in Dallas had lunch with me and described a short story he had written where people were vacationing in Lake Murray in Oklahoma when the entire outside world went zombie and mutant except for the area around this “conservative” enclave which would survive. He had written it in the earlies days of the AIDS epidemic getting publicity.
There had been a view of this film on a Blogger site called Anarchyreviews, and the blog was removed. Curious.
“Pandora” was the name of a hypothetical planet in the award-winning “Avatar” in 2009.
Name: “Pandorum”
Director, writer: Christian Alvart, Travis Milloy
Released: 2009
Format: 2.35:1
When and how viewed: Netflix DVD, 2020/1/8
Length: 108, 94 (theatrical), 125 (no cuts)
Rating: PG-13
Companies: Constantin, Impact Films, Overture Films, Summit Entertainment, Anchor Bay
Link: Fandom review
Stars: ***__
(Posted: Thursday, January 9, 2020 at 3:15 PM EST)