MOVIE REVIEW

The tedious, disorienting sci-fi/horror film follows two spacemen as they try to figure out what has happened aboard their ship while they've been asleep for a long time.

By Glenn Whipp

The sci-fi-horror hybrid "Pandorum" keeps its audience in the dark -- literally and figuratively -- far too long to be of much use besides as a patience-trying exercise in reference spotting. The movie owns a few interesting ideas, as well as an obvious devotion to the "Alien" franchise, but director Christian Alvart dishes out the dystopia in such bite-sized increments that you'll experience the titular cabin-fever sensation long before the film's characters do.

Alvart and screenwriter Travis Milloy aim to disorient from the get-go and, to their credit, establish a pretty decent puzzler of a premise. Two spaceship crew members, Bower (Ben Foster) and Payton (Dennis Quaid), wake up from a long cryogenic snooze completely disoriented. They don't know their mission or their location and have only vague memories of life back on Earth.

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Bower decides to investigate, beginning one of many, many long journeys into the proverbial night, drifting down the dark corridors of the eerily quiet spacecraft. He soon discovers that the ship hasn't been abandoned. That's not necessarily a good thing, though, since everyone he meets is either a fear-crazed survivalist or a flesh-hungry mutant.

The film's gruesome creatures are incredibly fast, ridiculously strong and look like the beasties from "The Descent," except that here they sport a post-apocalyptic fashion sense straight out of "Mad Max." One gathers these impressions over time because the quick-cut-crazy Alvart has an aversion to any shot lasting more than three seconds.

That's curious, because "Pandorum" sure takes its sweet time revealing the details of its story. This would be OK if Alvart used these moments to build tension and develop a few of the characters. Instead, he devotes most of his energies to indistinct fight scenes, leaving us with more questions than answers. Like: How does that sexy French scientist (Antje Traue) keep her muscle tone eating nothing but crickets? Dr. Oz wants to know.

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