Pandorum

Ok, I have to not quite confess something here, I love "Alien". I love that movie's concept so much that I even mostly love all the shameless rip offs it has had so far. It's just fun to see a movie in space with monsters chasing people. It's fun, can sometimes actually be a bit suspenseful and usually puts me in a happy mood.
Now, I've told you all this so you get an idea about how hard a movie has to actually try to make me say something like this: "I FUCKING HATE THIS MOVIE!!!" I'm dead serious. This has to be one of the most slow paced, idiotic, intelligence insulting pieces of shit that I've seen in a long time.
The plot, or rather what this movie likes to call a plot, is the two members of a flight crew carrying a large amount of people to colonize a new planet wake up from hyper sleep, don't know what's going on, and stuff happens... That's really all I can say. I mean, there are weird looking cannibal things that the crew has to run away from, and there are a few vague references to this form of dementia called, surprise surprise, pandorum, but really that's all I can sum it up as, stuff happens.
I think this movie's biggest problem is mostly that it tries to have you discover things with the characters, but really this is killed by the supporting cast being, and this is not a joke, an Asian guy that never speaks English and a female character that is never named and is pretty much just as in the dark as the main character and the audience. So in other words, the screenwriter and director were trying to have the audience learn what has happened with the main character instead of full on telling us, but then forgot to actually follow through and give us a reason for any of it.
Another thing that annoyed me is that this movie has a twist at the end, but it's so freaking lame it doesn't even deserve me swearing about it. It gets set up early on, but they hint at it so much that I wanted to track down the film makers and say "We get it!" very loud into their ears. Some subtle hints here and there that no one pays attention to during the movie is what makes a good twist. This just feels like the director had brain damage and kept saying, "Duh, I'm being too subtle. no one will ever know, let's add more!"
The performances are also pretty bad. Ben Foster does ok, all his character has to do is look confused so he just needs to look at the script and there you go. The female lead, who's name was Nadia but I never heard mentioned in the movie so I'll just call her female lead, speaks only in cryptic cliches and vague sexual tensions. And rounding it out is Dennis Somehow I Have a Career Still Quaid, and well, he's not terrible, but it's still pretty bad. I have to admit when he first woke up and was looking around like "where the hell am I?" was pretty funny because I imagined he was wondering how he's gotten into something like this.
The cannibal creatures are probably the only saving graces in this, and really they're still pretty lame. The only reason I enjoyed seeing them is that I kept holding out hope they'd catch the protagonists and eat them so this movie could finally be over. They look like if the cave dwellers from "The Descent" knocked up one of the aliens from the "The X Files", so in other words, nothing really original what so ever.
This movie was just such a disappointment. It took one of the few simple, yet proven formulas that still hasn't completely gotten as stale as last week's bread and actually fucked it up. I haven't got much more to say about it. It's stupid, goes too slow and by the end of the movie I was left saying what the fuck just happened. I watched the bonus features on the DVD and found out that this movie started out as two different scripts at the same studio so somehow it was decided that both movies should be turned into one, and in my mind I'm thinking that means one studio head went nuts with the cut and paste tools in Microsoft Word. It's the only way I can explain this movies random nature. I mean, as much as I bitched about "The Final Destination", that movie actually entertained me more than this. Yes, it's true. A sequel that was so creatively bankrupt it may as well have been a remake was better than this. Keep that in mind when you're in the video store and thinking you want to rent this.