Deep space requires no work to be made terrifying. It's already the most hostile environment before considering the risk of deadly aliens. As life-changing as it must be to experience the pale blue dot from orbit, the void could drive a person mad after a while. Christian Alvart's Pandorum asks; what if the final hope for humanity lost its mind in the blackness of space and threatened to wipe itself out?
Director Christian Alvart came up in film journalism before making his film debut in 1999. His English-language debut was Case 39, which premiered a few days before Pandorum in New Zealand. He's remained in his native Germany ever since. Streaming entertainment ensured easy distribution of foreign art, allowing his Dogs of Berlin to become a minor success worldwide. His thrillers and horror films aren't anyone's favorites, but he's a unique talent.
What is Pandorum about?
Pandorum is a fictional nickname for the effects of Orbital Dysfunctional Syndrome, a form of emotional breakdown that affects astronauts on long voyages. The 60,000 passengers on the Elysium are on a 123-year odyssey to escape the ruined Earth and colonize a planet called Tanis. The people aboard are kept in cryosleep, save for a rotating crew of maintenance workers who are woken up every two years to check on the vessel. Bower and Payton, two crew members, wake unexpectedly. Being pulled out of cryosleep without warning causes psychological and mental struggles, leaving Bower and Payton without memories. The nuclear reactor is unstable, and the bridge is inaccessible. They soon discover a disinterred corpse and a mortally wounded mechanic. It's up to Bower and Payton to learn why they woke up and what they're sharing the Elysium with.
Bower is chased by a mass of cannibalistic humanoids who seem to have torn the ship apart. He meets Nadia and Manh, who are initially hostile but willing to band together to survive. They find Leland, a cook who survived off cast-off water, moss, and human flesh. Payton encounters a dangerous man named Gallo, who lets him know the Elysiumis lost in space, and he killed his maintenance team in self-defense. Bower slowly pushes toward madness, realizing that his wife and everyone he ever loved died on Earth while they were in stasis. Leland explains that Gallo awoke dozens of passengers and goaded them into the violent, cannibalistic culture they currently enact. He returned to hypersleep, leaving them to evolve into nightmarish mutants. Bower, Payton, Nadia, Leland, and Manh must struggle to survive and discover if all hope is truly lost.
Why does Pandorum work?
When it comes to space horror cinema, Alien still reigns supreme. It's hard to find a scary movie set in space that doesn't borrow a few notes from Ridley Scott's masterpiece. Pandorum certainly owes a debt to the lost crew of the Nostromo, but it borrows from more than one film. It's riffing on Event Horizon and Sunshine and the occasional zombie thriller. The most significant difference is that Alien is Gothic horror in a futuristic setting. It's slow, haunting, meaningful, and deliberate. Alien digs into its viewers' brains and lives there, changing how they look at dark hallways and open ceilings. Pandorum is relentless, oppressive, and overbearing. It doesn't want to build an atmosphere. It creates a wall of sound and fury, then asks its heroes to maintain sanity. Alien is about being alone in the disquietingly silent void with something that lives to kill. Pandorum is about being drowned in violence and horror until everyone loses hope. Add an excellent performance by Ben Foster and an engaging unraveling story, and it's a fun experience.
How does Pandorum end?
Bower faces death to restart the Elysium's reactor. The energy kills dozens of mutants. Manh spares a mutant child who quickly kills him. Payton creates a sedative to deal with the increasingly erratic Gallo. In their struggle, Payton discovers that he's been Gallo the whole time. When Gallo woke up with amnesia, he believed himself to be Payton, whom he killed some time ago. Gallo kills Leland with the sedative. He unveils the ship's windows to Bower and Nadia, revealing the cold blackness of space without a star in sight. Bower loses himself as Gallo argues for the continuation of his primal society.
Nadia sees something glowing in the distance through the window. She reaches the computer, which tells her they've been on the Elysium for 923 years. They crashed on Tanis 800 years ago. Bower suffers a violent hallucination and breaks a window, revealing that they have been at the bottom of the ocean for eight centuries and flooding the vessel. Nadia drags Bower into a hypersleep pod as the ship enters emergency protocol. The 1,211 remaining pods are launched to the surface while Gallo and the mutants sink and drown. Bower and Nadia float to a lush tropical coastline while the other pods follow them.
Pandorum isn't the best thought-out movie ever made, but it deserves much better than the harsh critical reception it received. Sure, it's derivative, but it combines so many elements and executes them so well that it becomes its own project. Pandorum is a nightmare worth revisiting. Let the horror of space take its toll.