Many years from now, as the Earth becomes a nuclear battleground for ownership of its failing resources, the Elysium is sent into deep space with a cargo of 60,000 sleeping people and the DNA of most of the planet’s flora and fauna; a modern ark, maintained by several crews who will be woken-up in turn as the years pass, bound for the single planet that has been identified as earth-like, Tanis; their mission, to start again.

Astronauts Bower and Peyton, from Team 5, wake from their hyper-slumbers into a world of claustrophobic darkness: the Elysium is shutting down, its reactor gradually slowing and the power drained from all but the most basic of functions. Added to this is the memory-loss that long-term sleepers suffer upon waking – and they’ve been asleep a long, long time; and the increasing threat of mental breakdown and violent paranoia – Pandorum. As Bower explores the ship, attempting to make his way to the reactor he encounters several other survivors turned feral, and a race of possibly mutated and ferociously ravenous savages straight out of The Descent/Ghosts of Mars creature blender.

So what’s new, I hear you cry. Nothing much if I’m honest, but as I wrote above Pandorum takes certain tropes and specific elements from the sf/horror sub-genre and convincingly makes them its own. The atmosphere and cinematography are downright grimy, the Elysium is Nostromo’s big brother – all its corridors are dank and dripping after years of decay. None of the crews have been around to maintain the ship’s vast, maze-like structure and systems. The creatures are hyper-violent, scuttling across the corroding surfaces of the cavernous Elysium, and although the reason for their being there is rather nebulously explained, their presence and constant stalking threat ramps up the tension to almost unbearable levels á la The Descent.

The gradual return of Bower and Peyton’s personal and professional memories, combined with the stories of the survivors, develop into a history of the last moments of the human race on Earth, the breakdown of the crew of the Elysium, and a desperate fight for its future in a colossal sleeper-ship that knows it’s time to die.

As with The Dark Hour, Pandorum’s ending is wonderfully surprising, powerfully apt and contrasts completely with what’s gone before. It allows for a sequel, (although it’s unlikely as it didn’t perform well in cinemas), but they should leave it as it is: a clever, terrifying and uplifting film that will surely develop a cult following on DVD.

Pandorum, 2009

Directed by Christian Alvart

Director Marc Caro was one half of the innovative team behind the dark adult fairytales Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children; and his input to that successful collaboration is shown here as he runs solo for the first time: the claustrophobic steely cold environment, the lumbering spacesuits a la Sunshine; the shadowy ship, much like the Event Horizon.

The crucifix-shaped Space Station Dante 01 is a medical experiment; criminally-insane prisoners avoid the death penalty by agreeing to undergo drug trials and observation by a skeleton crew of scientists and security wardens. This uneasy arrangement is rocked when a new and unspeaking inmate, (Lambert Wilson, who played The Merovingian in The Matrix films), arrives under the care of a beautiful scientist, Elisa, who is under orders to test a new nanotechnology-based drug. The new prisoner, nicknamed Saint George, is apparently the sole survivor of an event that wiped out his crew and left him with the gift/curse of seeing inside people’s bodies. As Eliza’s drug kills the inmates, Saint George brings them back to life, seizing hold of the nano-tech virus and eating the infection, healing more than just the drug-induced illness. The prisoners and remaining staff must race against time to save themselves from the self-destructing ship and the determined Elisa.

The dialogue is appropriately minimal and the acting eerily intense; the entire cast is shaven-headed, the uniforms colour coded. Women are small and elegant; the men are huge, and craggy-faced, or physically twisted and manipulative. Characters’ names represent their actions: Charon the Prison Warden; Caesar the murderer; Lazarus, and so on. There are a couple of scenarios that should never have got past the draft scripting stage – why oh why would the emergency detonation shutdown switch be located beneath the prisoner’s quarters, at the far end of a corridor flooded by boiling water…?

Frustratingly, the event that shaped Saint George is not explained at all, not even hinted at. His talents are very much like a Sineater’s – taking on the sin of the deceased, but also moving into the God-like through resurrection and saintly silence, crying for the pain of others and the visions he experiences. This quasi-religious non-message begs explanation – just why is Saint George seeing what he is seeing, and what is his purpose? Unfortunately the film is simply too short, at 84 minutes, to answer these questions; the climactic scene is simply a repeated loop of special fx, that whilst technically spectacular and visually iconic, is far from informative and ultimately unsatisfying.

Still, Dante 01 is worth your time for its looks, quirks and impressive character acting, but it could have been so much more.

Dante 01, 2008

Director: Marc Caro; Writers: Marc Caro, Pierre Bordage, David Martinez

[This review was originally published in the Winter 08/09 edition of Prism, the Newsletter of the British Fantasy Society]