Pandorum

"A phone call from God... if it had been collect it would have been daring."

A crew man awakes aboard his spaceship disoriented and with barely any memory of himself or his mission. He sets out to discover what's gone wrong with the ship- and to regain his missing memories.

I found myself having a lot of trouble writing this review. I pondered the blinking cursor, typed and then erased, got up and came back- but nothing seemed to clear the barrier. Then it dawned on me: My loss word for the review was really an accurate review in itself. My feelings on Pandorum are so mixed I'm not really sure whether I liked it or not.

This I can say for certain: Pandorum starts strong. The first image the audience is shown
is enthralling, and straight off we are put into the shoes of our protagonist, who can't even remember his own name. It is not any sort of spoiler to say to that Pandorum is a noun and the explanation of what exactly it is is done so well and with such intensity that I had to take a breath when it was over. If this movie had ended with the first act, I would be screaming it's praises from a mountain top.
But it doesn't, and despite yet another beautiful performance from Ben Foster- it's in the
second and third acts that the story gets a bit convoluted. It looses the momentum the first act had built up as a very mental mystery story, and introduces a very unnecessary physical aspect. It then uses it's new found sense action to build and execute the climax. Now the truth is the climax is decent. The story wraps up well. But by then I was sitting heartbroken waiting for the sense of dark mystery to return- which it never did. This is where my confliction lays, not in whether it was well done, but whether it could have been done better using the sense of suspense it had originally introduced itself with. Sort of like meeting a girl and going on date after date, only to find out her hair was a wig and she'd been lying about the little details of her life. Sure this other girl may be very like able, but she's not who she claimed to be when you met.
Even with it's strange change of pace, Pandorum is still an enjoyable movie. A few of
it's ideas are truly intriguing, though some of it's big reveals are horribly predictable. Ben Foster really makes movies worth watching in my opinion, because he crafts himself into characters so well. I hope that this is the beginning of more work for him as a leading man, albeit not the brightest one.

Reel Deal Recommends:

3:10 to Yuma: For a chilling performance from the gorgeous Ben Foster.