Pandorum

With humanity finally having milked the earth to death, a sort of Noah’s Ark is hurtling through space in search of somewhere new for humanity to start again. Crewman “Bower” (Ben Foster) awakens from his hyper-sleep to find his inter-stellar vessel eerily devoid of crew and making some curious creaking noises. His explorations of the ship soon pairs him up with “Payton” (Dennis Quaid) whose pod had broken and who is just as disoriented. With the latter man staying on the bridge, “Bower” sets off into the body of the ship ill-prepared for what he is about to find. In some ways, this is reminiscent of “The Descent” (2005) with a decent chunk of menace, some end-to-end gruesomeness and a fair amount of spatial paranoia that Foster holds together well. Quaid is also on quite decent, if sparing, form too delivering a character that is never entirely trustworthy and there’s Cam Gigandet’s slightly enigmatic “Gallo” with whom “Bower” teams up as he manages to ally, after a fairly ropey start, with a small team of scientists holed up in the gunnels trying to work out their own way to safety. The visual effects and the photography have an effective claustrophobic sense of peril to them, and when coupled with some effective use of lighting and audio it all helps to create quite an ominous serious of scenarios. For a change, there is also some more meaningful - if not always so easily audible - dialogue as opposed to the usual gung-ho, yee-ha, type of stuff and I was pleasantly surprised with this well paced and above average sci-fi adventure.