SCI-FI HORROR; 1hr 47min
STARRING: Dennis Quaid, Ben Foster
Wake in fright: Antje Traue and Foster
In a distant future as bleak as they come, two amnesiac astronauts (Quaid and Foster as Lt Payton and Corporal Bower) awaken after years of hyper-sleep on the spacecraft Elysium. They find themselves in a blacked-out ship haunted by something frightful. With control of the gynormous craft of paramount importance, Bower sets off on a scouting expedition from spaceman hell: the Elysium is a Creature Feature, its paranoid human cargo hopelessly outnumbered by mutants who could have scuttled aboard from the set of The Descent.
Welcome to Pandorum, which in this dying world is a term for deep-space psychosis. And once stranded there, with all seemingly lost (“Out there, there is no rescue,” Payton says grimly, as one who unequivocally knows), how can the will to survive prevail? The psychological pulse at the centre of director Christian Alvart’s black hole is as primal as the need to breathe. Pandorum’s monsters are violent and relentless, but they’re nowhere near as threatening as its probe into the boundaries of sanity.
