pandorum [2009]

i'm at a loss. nearly speechless. how in the hell did this flick ever find the light of financing? this movie's been playing the cable channels for a couple months now and i've caught bits and pieces. finally, i can say i've seen it and i'm glad i didn't pay the premium ticket price demanded of a theater. otherwise i'd have choked on popcorn.

sci-fi, horror, a tip of the hat toward ridley scott's great alien [1979], this pic looks on the surface pretty good. two astronauts wake from hypersleep aboard a seemingly abandoned ship and discover horrible, pale creatures, bent on gnashing their teeth and killing whatever stands in front of them, shipmates who are not what they appear to be, and worst of all, dennis quaid orchestrating it seems the events as they happen. who knows.

you know what. this movie didn't make any fucking sense at all. when we get to the end, and here i'll spare you from seeing it because i'll tell you the ending, our two intrepid cowboys [er, technically cowboy and cowgirl], after enduring dennis quaid, a giant ship filled with all manner of greasy techno wonders, and the killer pale thingies, find out they've been aboard that ship for nearly 1000 years, and that the ship is actually under an ocean, and that they manage to make it to surface when their ship begins to implacably implode and fill with seawater. on top of the ocean now they see hundreds of others surfacing and an alien shore beckoning them. a scrawl then tells us that they populate the shore and it is year one.

huh?! how the hell did the producers pitch this one? hmmm. . .'you see, it's like jaws without the shark onboard the nostromo like in alien, but with a lot of pale humanoids that like to kill, and we'll throw in a little paul verhoeven-like total recall for a bit of mind-fuck reality bending. check please!'

they got it, the check, but they forgot to pay for a couple of writers to craft a credible script. oh well. their gain. my loss. i'm sure they're working on a sequel or maybe even prequel to pad out whatever gains this flick got. but for next go-round i hope they ask for a bit of coherence in the form of a script. i was hankering for some cheesy celluloid this past weekend and instead i got a rotten chunk of mold. i'll have to console myself with a screening of an umberto lenzi pic, say nightmare city [1980] where lenzi and crew knew they were making a piece of anti-art, and is thus more refreshing than most dreck foisted upon the viewing public by the major studios. plus pastaland gore fests like lenzi made costs a buck and some change instead of the fortune poured into making pandorum. i'm not making a direct contrast but perhaps sometimes the size of the budget goes to the filmmakers' heads and not to their hearts. passion is ruled out in favor of marketing and focus groups. well, i can only blame myself. i could've shut the tv off or at least changed the channel. rather i watched it to the bitter end.