Trivia / Pandorum

• Acting for Two: Andre Hennicke plays both the lead hunter and Gallo's commanding officer in the opening scene.
• The Cast Show Off: Mixed Martial Arts champion Cung Le shows some of his trademark spinning kicks while playing Manh.
• Method Acting: Ben Foster ate real insects, opting for a better natural reaction than CGI ones.
• Not Screened for Critics: Thought to be one of the reasons the film didn't do well.
• Playing Against Type: Ben Foster usually plays violent psychopaths. Here he's the heroic leading man, who's considerably more nervous and panicked than his characters usually are.
• Playing with Character Type: Dennis Quaid typically plays the hero of the story, while here he starts that way before slowly revealing his true colors.
• Real-Life Relative:
  • The child hunter is played by the director's daughter.
  • Ben Foster's brother Jon has a small role as the nameless passenger who wakes up and is promptly swarmed and eaten by the Hunters.
• Stillborn Franchise: The filmmakers hoped to make a trilogy, but the low box office numbers put a halt to that.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The film was originally just planned as a low budget direct-to-video affair shot in an abandoned mill with unknown actors, but Impact Pictures were so impressed with the script that they chose to produce it. Writer Travis Molloy had never thought it would get picked up due to the dark tone of the story.
  • The original treatment had the Elysium as a prison ship, where Bower would be a guard and Nadia and Mahn inmates. However, the director had written a similar script called No Where about astronauts aboard a settlers' ship, and they decided to combine the two screenplays together to create the film.
  • Pandorum was originally the name of the ship, but it was renamed Elysium when the ship was changed to a colony vessel. Pandorum then became the name of the mental illness caused by deep space travel.
  • Director's commentary has hinted that there could be an unrated cut of the movie, but none has ever been released.

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