(Warning: The following review will contain spoilers. Not that you should care though. This movie sucks, and I advise you not to see it.)
Probably one of the most influential horror movies of all time was Alien. It really is almost perfect. The atmosphere and the suspense are balanced perfectly. Characters you actually care about. Disgusting gore. Memorable scenes. Great creature designs. It inspired many sci-fi horror movies such as another classic The Thing. Unfortunately though, It also inspired this abomination of all things horror to be made.
Pandorum takes place in the 22nd century, where humans are on a journey to look for an earth-like planet because earth is dying because...because......uh.........because FUCK YOU that's why! Anyways, they are on their way to the planet that they found, so they go into a hyper sleep chamber. 8 years or so later, Corporal Bower wakes up along with Lieutenant Payton. BTW Payton is played by Dennis Quaid, which leads me into a theory that I made long before I watched this movie. If you truly want a full-proof way of finding out if a movie is gonna suck or be mediocre, then go see if Dennis Quaid is in it. I'm totally serious, practically every single movie he's in is never any good.
Anyways, back to the plot. Lieutenant Payton tells Bower to go look for the reactor for him so that they can get the ship running again, because apparently, nothing is working, and if the ship dies, they have no chance of getting to their destination. It's just like in video games where you are sent to do tasks for total tools who just speak to you in the comm ray thingy while you're out doing fetch quests because they are just downright useless. Just like Dead Space except it isn't even scary this time. So Bower explores the ship and sees that something's wrong. He can't find any crew members at all, and sees dead bodies hanging from the ceiling as bait for...something...Now I'll go to one of the few things that this movie gets right: The atmosphere kicks ass. It's dark, dingy, oppressive, and the setting and set designs for it are really awesome. But this leads me to a big flaw: They never use it correctly.
Rather than using it to build up on tension, they just decide to hurl everything at you thinking that suspense without any form of build-up is a good thing. It's not. You never have a chance to bask in the creepy atmosphere. There is rarely ever any silence. In fact, it's because of this that there is literally too much atmosphere. Srsly, you literally hear all of the echoing of the corridors so loudly that it actually drowns out all the dialogue. Not that I'd want to hear the horrendous dialogue from the terrible actors *Cough Cough Dennis Quaid Cough*, but there is never a chance for the atmosphere to just creep in on us. Everything is just thrown at you hoping that it hits you, but it keeps on missing. Suspense without build up is the equivalent of a comedy without any jokes.
Which brings me to something else: The pacing is absolute shit. Everything feels like it's cobbled together rather than expertly weaved. Once again, the director just decides to throw everything at you and hurl it all loudly. There's no time to appreciate the atmosphere. No time to appreciate the characters. No time to appreciate the creepiness of the "aliens" that are on board. They just keep pounding away hoping that they do something right. It feels more like a Michael Bay movie than a patient, horror movie. I know that there are some movies that are good at being all suspense all the time, but this movie has the concept influenced by Aliens and The Thing. It's supposed to be tension-filled. And it's hard to feel tension when the movie is louder and more obnoxious than Transformers 2.
There are some scenes that could've been soooo fucking awesome!...and they don't do anything right with them. There's a scene where Bower falls into a sewage filled with sleeping monsters, but it hasn't woken them up yet. So he literally has to wear some of their peeled skin (BTW: Another pro this movie has is that the gore is pretty cool sometimes) and crawl over all of the hundreds of sleeping monsters. Right when he finally reaches the ladder, his friend who's holding up the bridge for him accidentally drops the flashlight down in the hole, and makes a big loud splash. HOW AWESOME WOULD THIS SCENE BE! It sounds awesome when I describe it, but rather than being patient and letting you bask in the tension, everything is just loud loud loud. Silence is what brings us tension, not echoing atmosphere that is louder than an Autobot's engines! You're supposed to watch out for a tiny noise that could've woken up those things, but you can't hear a damn thing!
At first, I thought that this was the worst it could get...it wasn't. Apparently, they decided to throw in not one, but two twists. And I'll not bother and just spoil them right away.
Twist #1: Payton has split-personality disorder. There was a scene where Payton found the captain of the ship or something, and he is supposedly evil. However, it was actually just his split-personality, and once it takes over, he becomes all evil. It's bad but not too bad right? Right.
BUT...the second twist is so mind-numbingly awful, so excruciatingly bad, that my nipples curl in fear just at the thought of how fucking awful it is. So here we go:
You know how they've been trying to get to that earth-like planet all along? Well it turns out that the ship was on the planet THE WHOLE TIME since our characters woke up. They could've easily went into an escape pod and ejected themselves RIGHT AT THE BEGINNING if they knew this earlier, and all those people wouldn't have had to die, and we wouldn't have had to have dealt with this stupid movie in the first place. WHAT THE FUCK?!?!?!?!?! GOD...DAMNIT!! I HATE YOU MOVIE!!! FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU! RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!
We apologize for the inconvenience, but our reviewer has gone through a slight mental breakdown. Don't worry, we'll be back with our regularly scheduled program soon.
This movie sucks ass! This movie sucks balls! This movie sucks ass balls! However, the main problem here isn't just that it's bad. It's that it doesn't do all of the things it could've done awesomely correctly. In shorter terms: It's trying too hard. It's too ambitious and therefore leads to pretentiousness. It really wants to be the next Alien or The Thing, but it struggles at giving true tension. It has a solid atmosphere, and great gore, but does nothing to expand on these great things that it has. So Pandorum gets a 1.75/5.
And yes, I'm a total geek for horror.
Probably one of the most influential horror movies of all time was Alien. It really is almost perfect. The atmosphere and the suspense are balanced perfectly. Characters you actually care about. Disgusting gore. Memorable scenes. Great creature designs. It inspired many sci-fi horror movies such as another classic The Thing. Unfortunately though, It also inspired this abomination of all things horror to be made.
Pandorum takes place in the 22nd century, where humans are on a journey to look for an earth-like planet because earth is dying because...because......uh.........because FUCK YOU that's why! Anyways, they are on their way to the planet that they found, so they go into a hyper sleep chamber. 8 years or so later, Corporal Bower wakes up along with Lieutenant Payton. BTW Payton is played by Dennis Quaid, which leads me into a theory that I made long before I watched this movie. If you truly want a full-proof way of finding out if a movie is gonna suck or be mediocre, then go see if Dennis Quaid is in it. I'm totally serious, practically every single movie he's in is never any good.
Anyways, back to the plot. Lieutenant Payton tells Bower to go look for the reactor for him so that they can get the ship running again, because apparently, nothing is working, and if the ship dies, they have no chance of getting to their destination. It's just like in video games where you are sent to do tasks for total tools who just speak to you in the comm ray thingy while you're out doing fetch quests because they are just downright useless. Just like Dead Space except it isn't even scary this time. So Bower explores the ship and sees that something's wrong. He can't find any crew members at all, and sees dead bodies hanging from the ceiling as bait for...something...Now I'll go to one of the few things that this movie gets right: The atmosphere kicks ass. It's dark, dingy, oppressive, and the setting and set designs for it are really awesome. But this leads me to a big flaw: They never use it correctly.
Rather than using it to build up on tension, they just decide to hurl everything at you thinking that suspense without any form of build-up is a good thing. It's not. You never have a chance to bask in the creepy atmosphere. There is rarely ever any silence. In fact, it's because of this that there is literally too much atmosphere. Srsly, you literally hear all of the echoing of the corridors so loudly that it actually drowns out all the dialogue. Not that I'd want to hear the horrendous dialogue from the terrible actors *Cough Cough Dennis Quaid Cough*, but there is never a chance for the atmosphere to just creep in on us. Everything is just thrown at you hoping that it hits you, but it keeps on missing. Suspense without build up is the equivalent of a comedy without any jokes.
Which brings me to something else: The pacing is absolute shit. Everything feels like it's cobbled together rather than expertly weaved. Once again, the director just decides to throw everything at you and hurl it all loudly. There's no time to appreciate the atmosphere. No time to appreciate the characters. No time to appreciate the creepiness of the "aliens" that are on board. They just keep pounding away hoping that they do something right. It feels more like a Michael Bay movie than a patient, horror movie. I know that there are some movies that are good at being all suspense all the time, but this movie has the concept influenced by Aliens and The Thing. It's supposed to be tension-filled. And it's hard to feel tension when the movie is louder and more obnoxious than Transformers 2.
There are some scenes that could've been soooo fucking awesome!...and they don't do anything right with them. There's a scene where Bower falls into a sewage filled with sleeping monsters, but it hasn't woken them up yet. So he literally has to wear some of their peeled skin (BTW: Another pro this movie has is that the gore is pretty cool sometimes) and crawl over all of the hundreds of sleeping monsters. Right when he finally reaches the ladder, his friend who's holding up the bridge for him accidentally drops the flashlight down in the hole, and makes a big loud splash. HOW AWESOME WOULD THIS SCENE BE! It sounds awesome when I describe it, but rather than being patient and letting you bask in the tension, everything is just loud loud loud. Silence is what brings us tension, not echoing atmosphere that is louder than an Autobot's engines! You're supposed to watch out for a tiny noise that could've woken up those things, but you can't hear a damn thing!
At first, I thought that this was the worst it could get...it wasn't. Apparently, they decided to throw in not one, but two twists. And I'll not bother and just spoil them right away.
Twist #1: Payton has split-personality disorder. There was a scene where Payton found the captain of the ship or something, and he is supposedly evil. However, it was actually just his split-personality, and once it takes over, he becomes all evil. It's bad but not too bad right? Right.
BUT...the second twist is so mind-numbingly awful, so excruciatingly bad, that my nipples curl in fear just at the thought of how fucking awful it is. So here we go:
You know how they've been trying to get to that earth-like planet all along? Well it turns out that the ship was on the planet THE WHOLE TIME since our characters woke up. They could've easily went into an escape pod and ejected themselves RIGHT AT THE BEGINNING if they knew this earlier, and all those people wouldn't have had to die, and we wouldn't have had to have dealt with this stupid movie in the first place. WHAT THE FUCK?!?!?!?!?! GOD...DAMNIT!! I HATE YOU MOVIE!!! FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU! RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!
We apologize for the inconvenience, but our reviewer has gone through a slight mental breakdown. Don't worry, we'll be back with our regularly scheduled program soon.
This movie sucks ass! This movie sucks balls! This movie sucks ass balls! However, the main problem here isn't just that it's bad. It's that it doesn't do all of the things it could've done awesomely correctly. In shorter terms: It's trying too hard. It's too ambitious and therefore leads to pretentiousness. It really wants to be the next Alien or The Thing, but it struggles at giving true tension. It has a solid atmosphere, and great gore, but does nothing to expand on these great things that it has. So Pandorum gets a 1.75/5.
And yes, I'm a total geek for horror.
