I wouldn't bother...

Seeing as Zombieland wasn't out last weekend when I suggested a trip to my local Odeon the choices were rather lukewarm, it was either Surrogates, Pandorum or a boring night in with a DVD. To cut right to the chase, I wish I'd stayed in.

I knew very little about the film going in beyond the trailer that recently appeared on my Xbox 360's dashboard, that didn't inspire much confidence but seeing as my friend Dave had developed an aversion to Surrogates because it looked "very iRobot" (a fact me and him don't disagree on to be honest) and the only other option was Toy Story 3D I went along with Pandorum, it's Sci-fi right, how bad could it end up? Very.

Pandorum starts off with the main character, Bower (played in a rather by the numbers fashion by Ben Foster) being awoken in his hyper-sleep chamber after an unknown number of years on a ship that's mission he can't remember and that doesn't seem to be working particularly well. After a lot soul searching, skin peeling and a little banging on the airlock door with a stick he notices another occupied hyper-sleep chamber inhabited by Dennis "Jaws 3D" Quaid's character Payton. After the pair are reunited some memories come back and they remember that they're members of the flight crew on the Elysium, a ship designed to take sixty thousand settlers to the only other "Earth-like" planet scientists could find because Earth is dying. Quickly they realise some power might be a good idea, a plan is formed and Bower goes off on his own down an air duct to find a way to rejuvenate the ships dying nuclear reactor leaving Payton at the computer feeding him instructions via a headset. Inevitably the plan goes south as soon as strange "alien" beings are encountered that look suspiciously like a cross between Firefly's Reavers and anorexic Uruk-hai warriors and you spend the next ninety minutes cutting between Bowers mission through the guts of the ship and Payton handing out directions and struggling with the effects of "Pandorum", a fictional type of hyper-sleep induced psychosis not unlike schizophrenia.

Bowers trek through the bowels of the ship should be wrought with tension, especially given the setting as not only is it very dark but Paul Anderson has really gone to town with the design of the ship, think Event Horizon on gothic steroids. Unfortunately that just isn't the case, the combination of a dark setting and some rather chaotic editing means that it's very difficult to tell what's going on, especially when the action heats up and they bring on the camera operator who was apparently having a seizure. Even when things do slow down a bit for Bower and some light's shone on the set for a little much needed plot exposition the editing still makes things difficult to keep track of, oh and one more thing, someone needs to tell Mr Anderson that nuclear reactors (or in fact any power plant built by a sane person) do not all look like enormous spiky meat-grinders that would give a health and safety inspector nightmares.

So how does Dennis "Parent Trap" Quaid do on his end? Better but still not particularly brilliantly. His struggle with "Pandorum" towards the end of the film isn't badly acted but it leads down a path you'll have seen coming thirty minutes previously if you've got you're thinking cap screwed on and climaxes rather predictably if you've never seen Sunshine or Event Horizon. You do run into other characters along the way but you never really invest in any of them, there's one in particular who's lack of English as a first language immediately tags him for gruesome death at some point, he might as well have been wearing a red shirt.

Put simply Pandorum is a good concept poorly executed, it was never going to breathe originality into the genre but it could have been much better than it is, the twist at the very end's nice but in my opinion it's not worth the journey and you'd be better off picking Event Horizon out of the bargain bucket and having a night in.