Film Should have been B-rate, but it's not
LOVED IT. I love Ben Foster's character, and I think Dennis Quaid was born to play this part. One warning: PAY ATTENTION. This is one of those everything-adds-up-at-the-end thrillers, and you will miss out on the best cookies if you don't watch carefully.
Just to satisfy the snarky, I will include these points:
- Take a shot every time Bower takes one of those back-cracking falls onto something metal and/or pointy. You'll have a nice buzz by the end of the movie.
- The reactor has been running for decades, and Bower wakes up within an hour of the catastrophic failure? That's...rather convenient.
There, now that's out of the way, let me outline why this movie rocks. First, the tone. The TENSION was SO VERY TENSE. The fluctuating power, the flickering lights, the greasy engineering rooms and—OH GOD AN ALIEN THING...SPINES...OILY BLACK EYES...PALE...THE TEETH OH GOD...
My second favorite thing about the movie was Ben Foster. I have no idea how he did this, but he managed to convey two traits that I would have thought impossible to combine. He's The Determinator, for sure, but there's no steely-eyed heroic gaze, no posturing, no cocky one-liners. He's terrified. But he's still going to get to that reactor and restart it, and not For Great Justice or for a Dead Little Sister or even For Science. I think it's just because it's his job. His adherence to duty when the whole freaking world has gone mad is so endearing, it's almost heartbreaking.
Thirdly, Dennis Quaid. He is so reassuring and steady in the role of Payton, I would have voted for him for president. He was totally the man you want at Mission Control when you are climbing around a ship with carnivorous aliens and No OSHA Compliance. And then later, when he is introduced to Gallo...ooh the interplay between the two is just so deliciously paranoid schizophrenic, it's riveting.
I believe this movie is a worthy successor to the Alien franchise. Yes, I think it's that good.
Film Pandora + Pandemonium = Pandorum
Pandorum is a 2009 scifi film. It was sold as a horror film but instead comes off as a Mystery/Adventure/Epic type film. Its has common scifi tropes like creautre-on-a-space, space madness, and morlocks, ect. The title of the movie seems to be a fusion of the mythological words Pandora (Greco-Roman) and Pandemonium (Christianity) which seems to play a big part in the movie's direction. Basically, what I'm trying to say is that there are metaphors relating to stuff like the Ages of Man in Mythology, Odyssey, Dante's Inferno, Noah's Ark and ect. If you're able to pick this up than you might find this flick both thought-provoking and engaging. However the cons of this movie are that most of the characters are underdelevoped but memory loss plays a put in the story so its kinda of excused. There is also the editing in parts of the fight scenes that are too fast and there isn't any subtitles for some the foreign languages being spoken, through there is not much of it.
Overall, its well paced, has passable acting, and has good twist at the end. If you've seen the movie already than you might be interested in this analysis I made about the symbolism present in the film.
Film EVERYONE MUST WATCH THIS.
This is, quite simply, one of the greatest suspense films I have ever seen. It had a twist that felt both foreshadowed and surprising, a surprisingly original blend of plot elements (yes, I know it sounds like standard space survival horror. It isn't.) and a well-developed cast of characters. To go into details would spoil too much, but I spent a good fifteen minutes after watching the ending gushing to my roommate about how much sense everything made after the reveals.
Film A Good Movie with a very enlightening and inspiring twist...
The movie itself was dark and scary.
Think about it, the ship makes a great "Closed Circle" horror story and the murderous mutants hunting the protagonists all make for a great survival horror feel. But what gets me the most is how the twist in the story comes out and how it affected me:
SPOILERS AHEAD:
I'm kind of a religious guy and a Catholic one at that. It's mentioned somewhere on the main page that Gallo was a satanic archetype of sorts and I have to agree with that.
When the protagonists were on the bridge and he was gloating at them of how God had died and that they were on their own because the universe itself was GONE, I got really scared. I mean, I felt my heart get crushed by fear and despair when Gallo showed them that there were no stars to be seen beyond the bridge.
And yet, when it was shown that they were on the planet all along and had merely crashed into an ocean, I was filled with joy.
Gallo was wrong, was probably lying the whole time or somehow both and to me it was awesome. Like the Devil, he only made things LOOK bad for the protagonists. He showed them a glimpse of what was outside and, using their limited view, he tried to get them to his way of thinking. He was trying to convince them that they had reached the boundaries of the known universe or that the universe had simply ended while they slept. But then it was revealed that they were already on the planet Tannis and had been there all along.
I buy into the idea that sometimes, things only LOOK bad or SEEM bad, but once you get to see the whole picture, you realize that it was never really that bad to start with. It only APPEARED that way.
Don't know about everyone else and I'm sorry if this review isn't really clear but I'm going to say that I found this film very uplifting to say the least...