Pandorum

Friday 2nd October 2009, 8:54AM BST.

Paul W.S.

Anderson and producer Jeremy Bolt haul the sets of their 1997 collaboration Event Horizon out of storage and give them a new lick of paint for this deep space thriller directed by Christian Alvart (Antibodies).

The nightmare is as much for the two-dimensional characters as for us because Pandorum is a headache-inducing game of cat and mouse in a labyrinth of dimly lit tunnels that pales next to Alien and its sequel.

Alvart’s film might be tolerable if the action sequences were well orchestrated.

However, editor Philip Stahl seems to have a nervous twitch and cuts everything so furiously, even the most simple chase is reduced to an incomprehensible blur.

Composer Mitch Britsch turns up the volume to deafening on his thunderous orchestral score as cameras careen through pitch black and the grisly fate of the ship’s crew is revealed.

Travis Milloy’s screenplay clumsily attempts to blur reality and fantasy but the truth about the amnesia-plagued protagonists is blindingly obvious from the start.

The year is 2174 and the battle for Earth’s limited resources has reached boiling point.

We launch the spaceship Elysium.

On board are thousands of men, women and children, bound for the distant planet of Tannis, which can sustain human life.

During the journey, astronaut Corporal Bower (Ben Foster) wakes from hypersleep in the bowels of the Elysium with no memory of his mission, closely followed by his superior, Lieutenant Payton (Dennis Quaid).

A third member of the team is missing from his hypersleep chamber and the airlock is jammed shut, so Payton proposes to guide Bower through the ventilation ducts to unlock the door from the outside.

‘I’d rather be up and out than stuck in the trunk, wouldn’t you?’ asks the Lieutenant.

As the subordinate makes his way through the ship, he realises that something is dreadfully wrong: a race of carnivorous, alien creatures is aboard the vessel, hunting human prey.

The Corporal’s immediate concern is his wife and other loved ones but Payton refocuses Bower’s mind: ‘We save the ship, we save them.’ So Bower makes his way towards the reactor aided by fellow survivors Manh (Cung Le) and Nadia (Antje Traue), who have honed their survival skills against a relentless foe.

Pandorum is essentially an hour and a half of running and screaming interspersed with graphic scenes of dismemberment as hunters swarm over the survivors.

Alvart cuts back and forth between Foster’s gung-ho exploits and Quaid’s descent into madness in the claustrophobic control centre, neither strand holding much interest.

The climactic showdown is a mess – two of the characters magically find an escape route from the reactor, which doesn’t exist – culminating in an upbeat closing shot that could sow the seeds for at least one dreadful straight-to-DVD sequel.