super-structure

I watched Pandorum over the course of a couple of days this past week¹. I really hadn’t seen or read a lot about the film, other than a trailer and a very short interview with Dennis Quaid on Leno (or some evening talk show). I wasn’t really sure what to expect; but whatever I was expecting, this film wasn’t quite it.

Needless to say, this is going to be filled with spoilers. You have been warned.

This poster of Pandorum makes sense. The one with the wiring in the man’s arm does not. The latter perhaps let to some of my misplaced expectations.

The film is really like two scifi films spliced together, with only a minimal attempt and bring the stories back together at the end. This, I think, was where I felt most disappointed in the film. And I mean disappointed. I really wanted to love this movie. The acting is really quite good, I thought. Quaid gave one of his stronger performances in some time². I really liked Ben Foster as Bower. I couldn’t help but think that he reminded of a younger Edward Nortorn; and that is a very good thing. Cam Gigandet was truly un-nerving as Gallo and one of the highlights of the movie. The remainder of the cast were strong and all of the action was believable ³.

As a technical effort, this film truly shows off the German film industry exceedingly well and credit should be given because almost all scenes employ physical sets and real actors & monsters. That’s a rarity in the age of hyper-real CG films like Avatar; and this film looks great. I’ll certainly be watching director Alvart’s other films and would love to see him write/ direct more science fiction. If any were to be set of the planet of Tanis in the 32nd century, all the better.

But at the end of the film, I felt empty. I wanted something more out of this movie that I really wanted to like. It sort of stayed with me for the past few days. Namely, what I think this movie really needed was one strong plot. Instead, it had two weak ones.

In plot A, we have the protagonist who represents sanity and humanity fighting hordes of monsters⁴ with a few survivors to reach a goal and return. It is pretty classic scifi/ horror/ apocalypse/ survival stuff. There’s nothing wrong with that genre and this film does a modest effort at that.

In plot B, we have a physiological thriller as we try and figure out which of two characters truly suffers from Pandorum (aka – space madness), either the good Lt. Payton or the edgy Gallo. We soon find what passes as the story’s one novel twist in this plot line. That is, that they are Tyler Durden.

Some Issues

Pandorum’s treatment of hyper-sleep for sub-light speed space travel is scifi gold and is rightly used to advance the plot (both of them, actually). From the grogginess and “mild” memory loss to the absolute gross cleaning off of hundreds of years worth of shed skin⁵, it all really helped to give Pandorum a bit of its own style right from the beginning. It said to me that the writer and director had thought about this and were going to show us their own vision here. It really helps to set why a lot of these events unfold and was a bit of brilliance; and I really hate to see that not play out in the end.

We see the psychological effects of deep space travel as well, in the form of the film’s namesake illness. We get a school-book explanation from Payton early on as Bower asks about him about it. Later, we seen both men seeming to suffer from some of the symptoms. However, other than some weird looks and what we can only assume are hallucinations on the part of Bower, his issues are never really explored (Payton’s & Gallo’s are pretty well explained in full, bad guy monologue style). The polarity of Bower and Payton/Gallo as humanity versus insanity really could have been better dealt with in the film’s climax. We’re left with a sense of confusion. What caused Bower to be able to overcome the illness? What struggles did he face in doing so? Simply having him shake it off seems a bit weak for the illness which so important the film was named after it. Otherwise, we could have called the movie Space Mutant Hunters.

The biggest failure in terms of story is tying the two protagonists together in some meaningful way: Payton/Gallo and the mutant hunters. Just to say that Gallo slept and the hunters evolved is like trying to assume the butterfly effect as a plot device. Sure there may have been some dominoes from one that resulted in the other, but why not give us a bit more of a concrete relationship? This would have woven the two plot lines together, instead of just licking the back of one and hoping it stays on the other.

Some Suggestions

So, what would I have done differently? I mean, after all, I’m just throwing spitballs if I don’t offer something constructive, right?

I think the reactor core should have been related to hunter mutants in a more concrete fashion. There seems to be no rational as to why they all sleep there. It may be a trite scifi convention to claim that exposure to radiation causes rapid (and often horrific, backwards) evolution, but it isn’t so commonplace that it can just be assumed (if that is even what has happened here). So, in very clear terms we should state to the viewers that the ship decided to wake Bower up specifically for his expertise with radiation leaks in reactor cores (most of the flight crew are dead, so the ship has to wake up the one specialist it has left). Unbeknown to the ship and to Bower, some of the passengers closer to the core who were woken by Gallo centuries earlier began to get sick (Pandorum!) never went back to sleep normally. They began to try to use power from the reactor core, but instead damaged it. After generations (and having been given the evolution-enhancing drugs for settlers), they devolved into the hunters we see today. They live near the reactor core as they have learned that it mutates their offspring faster, making them more effective hunters.

As I said, the hunters and Payton/Gallo need a more concrete relationship, as well. Since it is stated that Gallo tried to act like a god, why have the hunters worship him as such. Fear of him and his whims is one of the few human-like thoughts they have passed on. The reactor core room could be strewn with cave markings (as opposed to the cannibal cook’s chamber) telling this story, which serves to tip off Bower⁶. In fact, they could see him as the destroy of Earth since he delivered the message to their ancestors and revere him as a hunter of whole worlds. To whatever extent the hunters revere him, in the final encounter with Payton/Gallo, the hunters can be sneaking in and just when Bower thinks they’ll do in Payton/Gallo for him, they refuse to and begin advancing on Bower. This would ad a huge level of fear for the protagonists as now both the antagonists are working together. Water & ejecting in a sleep pod due to hull breach would still be an acceptable end to stopping these unstoppable villains of the story.

Also, as stated earlier, seeing the difference in how Pandorum affected both Bower and Payton would have been satisfying. It would have made it clear to us the kind of struggles that both went through but only Bower could overcome. I think if Payton (while in his right mind) had given Bower the advice which allows him to overcome bits of anxiety/ Pandorum/ space-madness; but that Payton himself doesn’t/didn’t follow when he is Gallo. This would tie the two characters together while setting their paths apart in the story.

I would also have liked to have seen the symptoms of Pandorum, specifically the vivid hallucinations aspect, play a little more prominently into the story for Bower. Clearly, the hallucinations were a major component of Payton/Gallo’s story. So why should Bower only see one such hallucination for a short period at the climax of the film? Were more of his interactions actually hallucinations; maybe even ones which he and other human survivors shared? Not to go all deus ex machina here, but what if the whole hunter problem is just a shared hallucination brought on by paranoia and hallucinations of waking crew? Perhaps Pandorum isn’t a rare illness at all, but in fact the norm when a human has been in suspended animation for centuries? Just seems like a host of missed opportunities here in terms of ways to leverage what set this story apart; all given up in favor of the mutant attack movie.

Lastly, while I appreciated the hunters, I think the at some level detracted from the strong part of the story. Too much screen time was spent on them when the truly novel elements of the story were left for us to guess at. Though it pains to me to say it, I’d have actually rather had less killer mutant hordes in this film (and I am indeed a huge fan of killer mutant hordes, to be for sure). Instead, I’d rather seen more on the internal and human/human conflicts.

This notion struck me as a laid down to sleep the evening after having finished watching Pandorum. It wasn’t the hunters that made me take that one last glace over my shoulder before going to sleep. It was the thought of Gallo creeping up behind me. That’s a great villain.

And there it is. Some of the reasons of why I felt like this movie garnered three out of five stars. I wanted to really like it, but couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that in the enormous effort to craft such a well-styled film that much of the plot elements got left in the director’s notebook or on the editing room floor. It is a good scifi film and worth the time of any fan of the genre, just the same.

Note: I haven’t done a film review on this site in quite a long time and I sincerely regret doing so. I hope to get back into that and often it is a book or film such as this – where I felt that it fell just short of being great – that motivates me to do so.

1. It’s really not Angela’s sort of movie, so I watched it over the course of two lunch breaks. One of the perks of working from home, I suppose.↵
2. Though, given that this film came out around the same time as G.I. Joe, that’s a really low personal bar. I haven’t seen Legion, but I’m also not hearing anything positive there, either.↵
3. Nothing ruins fight scenes like bad wire work for me. This film has some aerial, Hong Kong style fighting and it is all done well and blends into the film.↵
4. The monsters are essentially the Reavers from Firefly/Serenity with a bit of orcs from Lord of the Rings thrown in to make them seem a bit more alien. That being said, they are creepy as hell and work well.↵
5. Not that I’m wanting to be overly picky here, but how could Bower have had a thick sheet of skin to pull off and only the kind of beard I grow in a few weeks. I’d have gone with a crazy beard and hair.↵
6. Instead, we have Payton’s wife. A memory of a character who is never explained, nor – for that matter – is Payton. Why is Gallo in his chamber? He sort of has to be for the story and yet I don’t recall any explanation of who Payton was or why Gallo would end up there.↵

A couple of months ago, Google announced that Android 2.0 (their mobile operating system) will include a maps navigation service which will provide turn-by-turn driving directions. This news was credited for driving down the stock price of navigation device manufacturers Magellen and Garmin.

But really, this should really come as no surprise. GPS was once so bulky and expensive of a technology that it’s inclusion warranted an entire device be built around it. Now, I get GPS along with WiFi and gigyabytes of storage in something the size of a quarter in my EyeFi camera card¹. As the cost of a technology like GPS, accelerometers, cameras, or WiFi approaches free, the uses for it will increase exponentially. Where it once was odd to include WiFi in a stationary device (an iMac or the Wii, for instance) which could be hardwired, cheap WiFi hardware does away with the need to run wires. Bluetooth does essentially the same thing, only with far less range and bandwidth. But, I think that the single best thing about this sort of device consolidation is the new uses that having essentially free hardware allows. Uses that we really can’t quite grasp until the tech is cheap enough to unleash them.

Even now, it may seem odd to think of GPS being included in to what is essentially a stationary device — like a desktop PC — but it once the cost of GPS is nearly zero, then it’s inclusion is inevitable. Including GPS allows a device to suddenly know where it is and that can be handy information; even if that doesn’t change very often. Why should it be easier to pull out your phone quickly get a map of what lunch places are around the office when you’re sitting at a desktop computer? Or insert the need for location for any other website of program you use on any given day² Data storage is cheap. GPS is cheap. The reasons for having a dedicated GPS device are rapidly approaching zero, which is what both my wife and I have tried to explain to anyone who mentioned we should get a car GPS.

So, I posit the following: When the cost of the technology behind a device drops below a certain threshold, that device will become obsolete in favor or other common devices which can co-op that technology to greater effect. Let’s call it Coleman’s law until someone else shows me someone else previously said it or something similar³.

You might argue: what about a device like the Kindle that uses cellular networks to communicate? E-readers surely won’t replace cell phones, will they? No, but I can’t help but shake the feeling that cell phones are destined to replace e-readers. And this coming from a guy who would love to have an e-ink display reader, himself.

Another argument against device consolidation is that general purpose devices (like a cell phone⁴) just can’t do any one of those things as well as a special purpose device; and surely that’s true. However, I never hear anyone complain that their low-budget GPS device doesn’t work as well as a high-end mapping system by Trimble used for construction. Nor do I really think most people care that the quality of video on YouTube doesn’t rival that shot on a RED camera. As a matter of fact, I doubt most people even know who Trimble or RED are. So does it really matter if your cell phone doesn’t shoot the same kind of photos or video as a fancy DSLR? My answer is no. The enthusiasts who really want that kind of quality will continue to use those device but the majority of people are taking photos for high-quality but rather because any photo is better than losing the moment.

1. Truly, the EyeFi card is simply amazing. It is the first bit of tech I’ve had in a long time that really seems closer to magic than to science.↵
2. Of course, cell tower triangulation or IP addresses can be used as reasonable substitutes for GPS technology, but the falling cost of GPS with respect to its accuracy makes it the logical option in almost any device, now.↵
3. Though possibly an extension of Moore’s law, they are not really the same thing.↵
4. I’m not using the phrase "smart phone" here as I simply now consider non-smart phones to simply be last-generation phones.↵