Waking to Pandora's box

Pandorum

plays like the best movie based on a video game to not actually have a video game to base it on, ever.

More to the point, it's a tight, minimalist, Alien-esque "something is loose and hunting people on our spaceship" picture, as claustrophobic as you'd expect, if not quite as paranoid as you might hope.

Ben Foster (3:10 to Yuma) and Dennis Quaid play two members of the crew of the Elysium, a vast colonizer ship sent from a fatally overcrowded Earth to an Earth-like planet more than 100 years' flight time away. They awaken confused. Procedure hasn't been followed. The crew shift that was to awaken them is nowhere to be found. Their memories are barely functional after their long sleep. The power is failing. The ship is making worrisome creaking noises. There's no way out of the compartment they're in, and no response to their radio calls.

So the younger one, Bower (Foster), climbs through the air ducts to find a way to open the door. Payton (Quaid) stays behind to guide him through the maze, using a computer on backup power. It's what Bower finds out there, in the dark corridors, darker storage bins, lockers, equipment rooms, and cryo-sleep warehouses of the ship, that is really creepy.

Some people are apparently awake. No one can answer his questions - "What happened? Where are we?" Most of them don't live long enough to, because something, a lot of somethings, are hunting them.

Bower sets off on a mission to "reboot" the reactor to save himself and whoever else is still alive on the ship, encountering beasties, colonists who turned themselves into warriors and survivalists (Antje Traue and Cung Le), and a guy (Eddie Rouse) who has gone off the deep end.

Emotionally investing in the characters isn't easy, but there's a lot to like in this lean, mildly scary, always engrossing film from Christian Alvart.

He uses the darkness, confined spaces, and limited color palette well, stages his shocks with some brio, and makes the "ticking clock" plot work, though perhaps not as thrillingly as we'd hope.

Quaid, playing the man left behind, must deal with another crew member (Cam Gigandet) who crawls in so they can debate which of them has gone space-sick with "Pandorum," a form of homicidal madness brought on by cryo-sleep, the confines of long space travel, and flaws in your psyche. Alvart maintains some mystery about what's really going on, though perhaps not enough.

But what's here is still entertaining, even if one suspects the real money will be in the game based on Pandorum.

Directed by Christian Alvart. With Dennis Quaid, Cam Gigandet, and Ben Foster.

Running time: 1 hour, 44 mins.

Parent's guide: R (strong horror, violence and language).

Playing at: Area theaters.EndText