Pandorum

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Pandorum
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Christian Alvart
Produced by	Paul W. S. Anderson Jeremy Bolt Robert Kulzer
Written by	Travis Milloy Christian Alvart
Starring	Dennis Quaid Ben Foster Cam Gigandet Antje Traue Cung Le Eddie Rouse
Music by	Michl Britsch
Cinematography	Wedigo von Schultzendorff
Editing by	Philipp Stahl
Studio	Constantin Film Impact Pictures
Distributed by	Overture Films
Release date(s)	September 25, 2009 (US) September 30, 2009(France) October 2, 2009 (UK) February 4, 2010 (AUS) September 8, 2010 (DVD and Blu-ray release) (AUS)[1]
Running time	108 minutes[2]
Country	Germany, United States, United Kingdom
Language	English, German, Vietnamese
Budget	US$33 million
Box office	$20,645,327 [3]

Pandorum is a 2009 German-British science fiction thriller film written by Travis Milloy, directed by Christian Alvart and produced by Paul W.S. Anderson. The film stars Dennis Quaid and Ben Foster. Filming began in Berlin in August 2008. Pandorum was released on September 25, 2009 in the United States,^[4] and on October 2, 2009 in the UK. The film's title refers to a fictional psychological condition of astronauts who fly through deep space.

Plot

Corporal Bower (Ben Foster) wakes up from hypersleep by a power surge to find himself alone, with no memory of who he is or what happened to the crew of the 60,000-passenger sleeper ship Elysium. Another power surge manages to awaken Lieutenant Payton (Dennis Quaid) who is also suffering from amnesia. They are unable either to access the ship's bridge or to communicate with anyone else, including the three-man flight crew team that they are supposed to relieve. With the ship wracked by power surges from a failing reactor, Bower assumes that he must be a technician automatically awakened by the principal on-board computer in order to effect repairs.

Bower begins exploring the spacecraft under Payton's radio guidance. Noticing odd physical symptoms, Bower talks with Payton about Pandorum, a psychological condition brought on by extended periods of deep-space travel (similar to cabin fever) and hypersleep. Its symptoms and effects include severe paranoia, vivid hallucinations, and epistaxis. Payton recounts the story of another ship called the Eden, whose Captain went insane and became convinced that the ship was cursed, so he jettisoned 5000 hibernating passengers casting them out into space to their death.

As Bower continues searching the ship he encounters dead bodies, fast-moving humanoid tribal creatures (dubbed Hunters), and a non-lethal (but deadly up close, according to Payton) riot control energy projectile weapon which he uses. Escaping from one of the creatures, he encounters other amnesia suffering survivors: Manh (Cung Le), a Vietnamese man working in Agriculture, and Nadia (Antje Traue), a German genetic engineer safeguarding millions of samples of plant and animal life from Earth. Following a struggle, Bower convinces them to assist him.

On the flight deck, Payton discovers another crew member, Corporal Gallo (Cam Gigandet), who reveals that he was part of the flight crew that received the final message from Earth. He claims that his other two crew mates suffered from an onset of Pandorum, and that he had to kill them in self-defense. Payton is wary of Gallo, noting his strange behavior.

Bower, Manh, and Nadia run into the lair of Leland (Eddie Rouse) who has been awake for years. There they learn from Leland that Earth, suffering from massive overpopulation, launched the Elysium on a 123-year voyage to an Earth-like planet called Tanis to create a settlement. When the ship received a message of Earth's destruction, conflict had happened between the crew leaving only one alive (Gallo) who soon began to suffer the effects of Pandorum. He had then awakened some of the passengers so that they too would develop Pandorum, then ordered them into the hold of the ship to fight each other and feed on the corpses of the fallen. When he grew tired of this, he went back into suspended animation, and left the rest of the passengers awake. While he slept the passengers had, over time, adapted to their animalistic living conditions by becoming the primitive creatures that now roam the ship. Nadia postulates that the passengers mutated due to an enzyme that was given to them in their feeding tubes that was intended to accelerate evolution so that their bodies may adapt to living conditions on Tanis, but instead have adapted to the ship.

Listening to this story, the survivors lose consciousness, having been gassed by their host. While at the same time Payton starts to show symptoms of Pandorum after hearing what had happened to Earth from Gallo. Upon awakening, Bower, Manh, and Nadia find themselves in shackles, with Leland preparing to kill them for food. Nadia then berates Leland, to which he responds by stabbing her. He prepares to kill her first but is convinced by Bower to allow them to restart the ship's nuclear reactor, which is about to shut down. The group fights their way down to the reactor, where the mutants have taken refuge. While Manh lures some of the cannibals away, Bower activates the reactor, averting disaster. After a climactic battle, Manh defeats the Hunter leader, only to be killed by a Hunter child. Leland, Bower and Nadia make a break for the bridge.

A fight with Gallo results in Payton being injected with a sedative, which dissolves his hallucination and awakens his memories: he is Gallo, having lost all recollection of his identity and crimes during his second bout of hibernation. Leland arrives ahead of Bower and Nadia, and Payton/Gallo kills him with the hypodermic gun and retreats to the bridge. Bower and Nadia confront him about his deception and his actions, and Gallo responds by retracting the inner bulkhead to reveal a blackened sky surrounded by fluorescent sea creatures. The ship has crash landed on Tanis and sunken into one of its oceans; the flight recorder indicates that the 123-year mission has extended into 923 years.

Gallo attempts to exploit Bower's fragile mental state to convert him to his side and create an ecosystem of homicidal competition to combat overpopulation. Nadia attacks him, but is defeated due to her injuries. Bower hallucinates Hunters breaking into the bridge and fires at a console; debris damages the observation window and the ocean breaches the ship. Bower and Nadia dive into an escape pod as Gallo and the Hunters drown. The ship begins an emergency evacuation protocol and purges the remaining 1211 hibernating crew members to the surface of the Earth-like planet of Tanis.

The final shot reveals Tanis to be a blue, earth-like planet with two moons. A title card appears displaying: "Tanis Year One" followed by "Population 1,213..."

Cast

• Dennis Quaid as Lieutenant Payton
• Ben Foster as Corporal Bower
• Cam Gigandet as Corporal Gallo
• Antje Traue as Nadia
• Cung Le as Manh
• Eddie Rouse as Leland
• André Hennicke as Hunter Leader
• Norman Reedus as Shepard
• Wotan Wilke Möhring as Young Bower's Father
• Niels-Bruno Schmidt as Insane Officer Eden

Production

Travis Milloy wrote a preliminary script which was set on a prison ship. The characters played by Antje Traue and Cung Le were inmates. Ben Foster's character was a non-prisoner who did not trust anyone. The producers gave the script to director Christian Alvart who was struck by the similarities to his own screenplay titled No Where. His dramatic story was about four astronauts aboard a settlers' ship who suffer from amnesia. Alvart decided that they should weld the two screenplays together, and the producers and Milloy agreed.

Pandorum was announced in May 2008 with Dennis Quaid and Ben Foster in lead roles. Christian Alvart was attached to direct the film, based on a script by Travis Milloy. The movie was financed by Constantin Film through a joint venture deal with subsidiary Impact Pictures.^[5] The partnership helped fund the $40 million production. Constantin drew subsidies from Germany's Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg (MBB) regional film fund, the German Federal Film Board (FFA) and the German Federal Film Fund (DFFF). The German Federal Film Fund provided $6 million to the production, the fund's second-largest 2008 payout after $7.5 million for Ninja Assassin.^[6][7] Filming took place at Babelsberg Studios in Potsdam in August 2008.^[5][6]

Allegory

According to the bonus content on the DVD, Christian Alvart had claimed that he approached the film as an allegory for human life on Earth. The ship is addressed as its own world twice in the film, especially in its backstory, as told by Eddie Rouse's character, which is spoken with a strong mythological tone that involved the presence of a god/devil-like figure responsible for the "evils" in that world and the degradation of the human condition, somewhat similar to the stories in the poems Works and Days and Paradise Lost. The film's title also appears to be derived from two names that are present in the poems, Pandora and Pandæmonium.

Another mythological reference is the name of the ship, Elysium, which was the resting place for heroes in classical mythology that bordered the River Lethe, the part of the underworld where the memories of "earthly lives" were erased so that souls could be reincarnated — similar to how the characters onboard the Elysium mostly have no memory of their lives on Earth and are even referred to as "heroes". Another reference to the underworld is the Hunter lair that Leland calls "Hell itself", which resembles The Third Circle of Hell that Dante Alighieri crossed during his journey through Hell into the "Earthly Paradise" in The Divine Comedy. Additionally, the poem also mentions Elysium and features a confrontation with the Devil.

Release

Ben Foster, Cung Le and Antje Traue talk about Pandorum at a panel discussion at WonderCon 2009.

Summit Entertainment handled foreign sales and presented Pandorum to buyers at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival.^[5] Overture Films distributed Pandorum in North America, Icon in the United Kingdom and Australia, Svensk in Scandinavia, and Movie Eye in Japan. The film was set up as a possible franchise, so that if it performed well, Impact Pictures could green-light one or more sequels.^[6]

The DVD and Blu-ray release occurred on January 19, 2010 in the United States^[8] over Anchor Bay Entertainment.^[9]

The director and producer commentaries on the DVD indicate that an unrated version of the movie exists but has not been released.

Reception

The film received mostly mixed to negative reviews from critics. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports the film as holding a 27% approval rating based on 77 reviews.^[10] The site's consensus is that "While it might prove somewhat satisfying for devout sci-fi fans, Pandorum's bloated, derivative plot ultimately leaves it drifting in space."^[10] At Metacritic, which judges on a 0-100 scale, the film holds a "generally unfavorable" score of 28 based on 13 reviews.^[11] Science fiction magazine SFX was more positive, stating that "Pandorum is the finest interstellar horror in years", and awarding the film 4 stars out of 5.^[12] Film Ireland also gave Pandorum a positive review, appreciating the film's synergy of cinematic techniques, set design, and developed characters.^[13] Audience reaction was mostly positive at website Box Office Mojo; their polls report that on a scale of A+ to F, the average grade cinemagoers gave the film was B+.^[3]

The film grossed $20,645,327 worldwide, therefore failing to bring back its $33 million budget.^[3] The film opened at #6 at the US box office with weekend receipts totaling $4,424,126.

Soundtrack

Pandorum
Soundtrack album by Michl Britsch
Released	September 25, 2009
Recorded	2009
Genre	Electronic
Length	71:06
Label	Königskinder Schallplatten GmbH
Producer	Michl Britsch

Track listing

1. "All That Is Left of Us" (2:43)
2. "Pandorum" (3:58)
3. "Anti Riot" (4:17)
4. "Shape" (2:03)
5. "Hunting Party" (2:48)
6. "Kulzer Complex" (4:40)
7. "Tanis Probe Broadcast" (2:01)
8. "Scars" (2:20)
9. "Fucking Solidarity" (3:28)
10. "Gallo's Birth" (2:22)
11. "Biolab Attack" (2:25)
12. "Kanyrna" (3:22)
13. "The Stars All Look Alike" (4:32)
14. "Boom" (3:55)
15. "Reactor" (4:08)
16. "Skin on Skin" (3:21)
17. "Fight Fight Fight" (2:56)
18. "Bower's Trip" (7:51)
19. "Discovery / End Credits" (7:55)

References

See also

• Hull Zero Three
• Orphans of the Sky
• Non-Stop (originally titled Starship)
• Metamorphosis Alpha
• The Ark In Space
• The Starlost
• Ship of Fools (Russo novel)

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Pandorum

• Official website
• Official Soundtrack Site
• Pandorum at the Internet Movie Database
• Pandorum at AllRovi
• Pandorum at Rotten Tomatoes
• Pandorum Trailer