Pandorum: These Long Trips Can Really Mess With Your Mind - Reactor

Pandorum (2019). Directed by Christian Alvart. Written by Travis Milloy. Starring Dennis Quaid, Ben Foster, Antje Traue, Cung Le, and Cam Gigandet.

I read a lot of movie reviews as part of my research for this column. Sometimes I want some perspective on how a movie was perceived at the time of its release, or what cultural touchstones were in people’s minds as they were watching. Sometimes I want some insight into how critics reacted to a film that has since been assessed differently, or even reached beloved cult film status. There is also the fact that I find movie reviews interesting, because I find the way we talk about movies interesting, which is why I am here talking about movies.

Pandorum has not achieved any sort of cult status, although it seems to be fairly well-liked among sci fi horror fans. I can see why. It’s not a great movie, but it’s spooky and entertaining and has some fun sci fi horror stuff going on. I don’t love it, but I didn’t hate it. I don’t regret spending my time watching it and having a chance to talk about it.

And that makes the movie’s reviews fascinating—by which I mean sometimes I want to study pop culture criticism and commentary like a bug under a microscope. That kind of fascinating. Pandorum, like a lot of sci fi horror films, was completely trounced by critics. I’m not convinced all of those critics actually watched the whole movie or paid attention—or if they did, their desire to participate in clever snark masquerading as criticism was more important than getting any details right.

That puts me in the awkward position of wanting to defend a movie that I found to be mostly… fine. Yes, it is a horror movie that takes place in space, but no, it does not have the same plot as Alien (1979). Multiple reviews state that as simple fact, and I can’t tell if it’s because they didn’t watch this movie or they never watched Alien, but I guess it doesn’t matter. Yes, there are some confusing parts, but the pieces of the story are all in the film; they’re just revealed in a sort of inside-out way because the characters start out with amnesia. Yes, the title is a made-up word, but the film does in fact define that word many, many times—so many times that eventually I was impatiently thinking, “Yes, we know, you explained that already, we get it.” But apparently we do not all get it, because more than one reviewer states they have no idea what “Pandorum” refers to and are not interested in finding out. One reviewer suggested staring at the female actor’s cleavage instead of paying attention to the action, which should not surprise me at this point, but it still kind of surprised me.

I’m not here to do a dissection of the trends and assumptions that guide bad-faith film criticism in the internet brainrot era. I bring it up because it’s a very stark reminder of something that sci fi fans, horror fans, and especially sci fi horror fans have known for a long time, which is that sometimes movie reviews tell us a lot about what’s going on inside the reviewer’s head but very little about the film itself.

So let’s talk about the film itself!

In the not-so-distant future, the Earth is polluted and overpopulated, so people build a massive ark ship to make a 123-year journey to a habitable planet called Tanis. The ship is named Elysium; this movie came out four years before Elysium (2013), but in both cases I wonder about the wisdom of naming spacecraft after a conception of the afterlife. During the brief prologue, we see that a mere eight years into the mission, the few crew members who are still awake receive a cryptic message from Earth telling them that Elysium is carrying the last of humanity.

Then we skip forward some unspecific amount of time. Two crew members, Bower (Ben Foster) and Payton (Dennis Quaid), wake from their space hibernation. They don’t remember anything, but they quickly realize that they are trapped in the room where they woke up and the ship seems to be suffering from some serious power problems. They need to learn if anybody else is awake on board, reach the ship’s bridge, and fix the power problems. Bower crawls through the ventilation system to do that—does it even count as a spaceship story if nobody is crawling through the ventilation?—while Payton remains behind on the computers to guide him.

It’s not exactly surprising, as a person who has seen a movie or two before, that Bower is not going to be able to slip over to the ship’s bridge and start the engines easily. Still, the film sets up the inevitable quite nicely. The setting of a huge, dark, industrial spaceship bigger than we can really comprehend is effectively creepy, as are the moments of tension where we know Bower is walking into a horror movie but he still thinks he’s just going to fix a spaceship. There are, of course, people in the darkness: some of them dead, some alive, and a great many of them changed.

Bower eventually joins up with Nadia (Antje Traue) and Manh (Cung Le), and their small group makes their way through the ship, trying to avoid hordes of pale, spear-wielding, cannibalistic hunters while piecing together what went wrong on humanity’s last grand journey. Meanwhile, a crew member named Gallo (Cam Gigandet) joins Payton and reveals what he knows; the story Gallo tells involves the ship’s awake flight crew succumbing to the mental affliction known as “pandorum,” which is their name for what happens when space travel drives people insane.

There is a lot of familiar stuff in here—some of it remixed in interesting ways, some of it more predictable, especially to somebody who has read a lot of sci fi books about sleeper ships or generation ships. There is, indeed, an awful lot of creeping around in very dark spaces while trying not to attract the attention of the cannibal creature-people, which I assume is why some reviews and reactions call Pandorum “The Descent (2005) in space.” I haven’t seen The Descent (I am a huge scaredy-cat, okay?) so I’ll let others chime in about how accurate a comparison that is.

The screenplay for Pandorum came about when director Christian Alvart and screenwriter Travis Milloy mashed together two stories they had come up with separately. Milloy had a written a screenplay about a prison spaceship on which some inmates become cannibals and begin hunting other people aboard. He wrote the first version of this story in the 1990s—that is, well before the release of the Dead Space video games people still assume inspired Pandorum. Milloy names two movies that did inspire the story: Escape from New York (1981) and The Poseidon Adventure (1972). As someone who got nightmares from watching The Poseidon Adventure at a middle school slumber party, I understand that perfectly.

(And as someone who is also often asked about being inspired by the Dead Space video games, I will just reiterate what I wrote last week: What’s really going on here is that those of us who like to write about spaceships full o’ death just like a lot of the same things. I will add some wholly unrelated advice: Don’t listen when your publisher asks you to change your novel title and promises that nobody will be confused if it shares a name with a popular video game franchise. They are wrong. People will be confused. I’ve never played any Dead Space game. I’ve already told you I’m a huge scaredy-cat.)

Milloy had worked on some movies before, but he wasn’t really in Hollywood or part of the Hollywood machine, so he figured he would just make the movie himself with an ultra low budget and a small cast. He planned to film it in an abandoned paper mill. But his agent let him know that there was a British indie film studio interested: Impact Pictures, the studio founded by Jeremy Bolt and Paul W.S. Anderson, which had co-produced Event Horizon (1997) and the Resident Evil films. German director Christian Alvart was interested in Milloy’s Pandorum, and he brought in some of his own story elements, including changing the setting from a prison ship to an ark ship traveling to a new planet.

That change is central to how the movie’s story plays out. Humans have been imagining what realistically long space journeys might be like for about as long as humans have been seriously thinking about space travel. Most sources agree that rocketry pioneer Robert H. Goddard was the first to describe a proper long-haul spaceship. In some notes he wrote in 1918 (sometimes inaccurately referred to as an essay), he laid out the basic premise of what we now call a generation ship or ark ship. These include ideas like the possibility of humans evolving over the time it takes to travel through space, the practicalities of waking up the pilot at intervals throughout the trip, seeking out destinations likely to have habitable planets, and bringing along as much human culture as possible to start a new civilization.

(Note: I can’t verify the text in that above link because it is not easy to find the full text of Goddard’s notes online, although there are excerpts everywhere. Alas, I can’t tell if it’s because the text isn’t available in other places or because recent “improvements” have completely ruined online search tools.)

All sci fi fans are familiar with these ideas, and all sci fi fans are familiar with the sci fi writer’s urge to take those ideas and ask, “But what if it all goes terribly wrong?”

Long, lonely space journeys on enormous ships are excellent settings for stories in which things go terribly wrong, and I think Pandorum does a lot of those things really well. The setting allows for a curious combination of both claustrophobia and agoraphobia, because their environment is strictly confined but they don’t know what dangers are lurking in that environment. We know, in the real world, that space travel is bad for the human body and prolonged isolation is bad for the human mind, and there are many different ways that can evolve, or devolve, to shape individuals and communities into something unrecognizable.

I will admit to being disappointed that Pandorum pulled its punches a bit at the end, but I was not at all surprised. I’ve seen the “actually we were at the destination all along” ending before for ark ship stories, and I will no doubt see it again, because sci fi writers love it. But before we get there, so much is winnowed down to mere survival, but even that can feel wrong. That’s driven home when Bower and the others meet Leland (Eddie Rouse), who admits that he doesn’t even know why he’s trying so hard and resorting to such terrible tactics to survive.

There is also a sense of terrible helplessness that shapes how the characters act in space horror that I really love. Even with a very specific goal—restart the reactor—there is a feeling that every step will lead to another “And now what?” moment if despair. They can’t call for help. They can’t go home. They can’t even alter course. Their options are limited, but they want to survive. Pandorum isn’t a great movie, but it plays with some of these space horror elements in an entertaining way aboard a creepy spaceship full of corpses, and I enjoyed it perfectly well for what it is.

What do you think of Pandorum? Deserving of its scathing reviews or not? Where does it sit in your personal ranking of movies feature roving hordes of cannibals?

Our Space Journey Keeps Getting Worse…

I’m having a lot of fun watching terrible things happen to people in space, so we’re going keep working down my list of films about exactly that.

September 3 — Europa Report (2013), directed by Sebastián Cordero

The first manned mission to Europa does not go smoothly.

Watch: Kanopy, Hoopla, Amazon, and so many more.

View the trailer.

September 10 — High Life (2018), directed by Claire Denis

Sure, why not send a bunch of prisoners to a black hole with a mad scientist? Seems like a good idea.

Watch: Amazon, Apple, Fandango.

View the trailer.

September 17 — Sunshine (2007), directed by Danny Boyle

The Sun is dying and the mission to fix it has some problems.

Watch: Amazon, Hulu, Apple.

View the trailer.

September 24 — Aniara (2018), directed by Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja

A ship goes off course on the way to Mars and people handle it poorly.

Watch: Kanopy, Hoopla, Roku, and more.

View the trailer.