The first time I watched this movie it was on Halloween during one of these challenges, and I was so tired I kept falling asleep and waking up and rewinding the movie and watching it again. I did that like four or five times throughout the course of the movie and it pissed me off so bad because I really liked the movie, I just couldn't stay awake. I vowed one day I would watch it when I was feeling better and I wouldn't keep passing out and having to restart it because I was suffering from overload on some day when I crammed one too many movies in (this year I haven't watched more than five in a day, but in past years I would watch like ten in one day, and my poor brain can't take that overload of information anymore). So today, this is the fourth movie I'm watching, but my brain is still fresh, so I should be ok. Bring on the sci-fi horror!
This movie is about two astronauts named Payton and Bower who awake from what they assume is a long slumber in a hypersleep chamber with no memory of who they are or what their mission might be. Payton takes over running the radio transmitter, while Bower goes out to investigate the rest of the ship, which appears to be eerily abandoned. Unfortunately, they soon realize they're not alone, and the fate of mankind hinges on what they're going to do next.
Payton is played by Dennis Quaid, and Bower is played by Ben Foster, so there's some decent star power behind this movie. As you can see from the three movie posters highlighted above, there were lots of cool designs, and I found it too hard to choose just one. I hear this movie accused of ripping off Event Horizon a lot, but I think it's pretty different from that movie (which I love, by the way, even though it's cool to hate on it now). I like how the movie starts and you're literally in the dark about what's going on, what's happened to our characters, and you only learn in bits and pieces at a time what is happening now. We're just as clueless as our characters, and it's very disorienting.
Yeah, this movie really has no resemblance to "Event Horizon." I mean, they're both movies set in space on spaceships, but that's about it as far as similarities go. Where in "Event Horizon" the villain is really the ship, in this movie the villains are evolved mutant creatures that have a penchant for human flesh, and a mysterious condition called "Pandorum" which is a madness that takes over people when they travel in space. It's never really clear what "Pandorum" is, just that it takes over people's minds and bodies until they're not totally human anymore, and no one on the ship remembers exactly what happened and they all act like they're insane, so it seems that madness is everywhere you look on this ship, so anyone could have Pandorum as far as I'm concerned, and that's the scariest part of all.
When this movie was more than two thirds of the way over with and I still had no idea what was going on, I began to get a bit irritated. It's fine to have a slow burn and unreliable narrators, but after awhile it gets ridiculous and I just can't with this movie. I get it, flesh eating bad guys are scary, but we still didn't know yet what the ship was supposed to be doing or what its mission was, or why everyone left alive on the ship can't remember what happened, or who's crazy and who's done (or if everyone is insane and they're all just having a big crazy party in space). The funniest thing is when the bad guy is giving his long, explainy speech about what happened, the description doesn't make any sense, so you come out knowing less about what's going on than when you started the movie. I literally hate it when that happens. I had to look up the movie's Wikipedia page in order to understand what happened in the movie, and I hate it when that happens, too. Overall this movie is disjointed and messy, but it has a lot of intriguing ideas. If that's your jam, you might want to check it out. I mostly wished I'd watched "Event Horizon" instead.
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