Welcome back to Movie Recaps.
Today I will show you a 2009 sci-fi horror film, titled Pandorum.
Spoilers ahead!
Watch out and take care.
In the year 2174, overpopulation has depleted Earth's resources, so humanity builds an interstellar
ark called "Elysium" to send sixty thousand people to colonize Tanis, an Earth-like planet.
Since the trip will last over a hundred years, the crew is put in hypersleep, and teams will
wake in turns biennially to maintain the ship.
Eight years after the mission starts, the ship receives a message from Earth: "You're
all that's left of us.
Good luck, God bless, and godspeed", but it's only seen by a few crew members, including
Gallo.
An unknown amount of time later, Corporal Bower wakes up inside one of the hypersleep
capsules, disorientated and suffering from partial amnesia.
As soon as he is out and disconnects all the wires from his body, the power in the ship
goes out, but luckily there is a flashlight nearby that he uses to investigate the area.
All the other capsules are empty except for the one with Lieutenant Payton in it, and
looking at his own helps him remember his name, but there are no other crew members
around.
The ship's control panel isn't working, but he does find his locker with some clothes
and a picture of his girlfriend.
While changing, he notices the tattoo on his arm that marks him as part of team five.
The door to the bridge is locked with no way to open it, although there are tools on the
floor and marks on its surface, indicating someone was desperate to get out.
Furious, Bower goes to hit Payton's capsule over and over, to no avail.
He decides to take care of his beard next, and while shaving, the ship starts shaking
before it releases Payton from his capsule.
He's also disorientated and like Bower, he doesn't remember the destination or the mission,
but they do remember the training.
This allows Payton to find the emergency power unit and reactivate the control panel, but
when they try the communication lines, nobody replies.
Suddenly, the ship starts shaking again, and they hear some noises in the ventilation shafts
which Payton blames on the system rebooting itself every time there's a surge from the
unstable nuclear reactor.
Deciding they should find a way out of the room, Bower climbs into the shafts while Payton
guides him through the comms by looking at the maps on the computer.
For a while, Bower finds nothing interesting inside the shafts, but eventually he comes
across a spider and decides to follow it until he falls against a shaft grill, where he finds
the body of a fellow crew member.
After some struggling in that tight space which turns out to be a boot locker, he manages
to push the grill off and come out in the middle of a room, but this also means he's
lost contact with Payton.
This room's door does allow him to push it open, so Bower starts walking through the
hallways to investigate and finds a woman named Nadia, who runs away as soon as he comes
closer.
Bower chases after her and, as he turns around a corner, he comes across a body hanging from
the ceiling.
While he tries to understand what happened, Nadia takes advantage of his distraction to
attack him from behind and tackle him to the ground.
Threatening him with a knife, she searches through his pockets and asks him to take off
his boots, but she suddenly goes away when some weird growling noises start echoing at
the end of the hallway.
The hanging body is taken by a group of humanoid cannibalistic creatures that Bower is terrified
to see, so he runs away as well until he gets back to the boot locker room and hides in
the shafts.
Returning to this location means he regains contact with Payton, so he has to cover his
communicator not to be heard by the monsters.
One of the creatures enters the room and finds the body that fell from the ventilation shafts,
taking it with it when it leaves.
Once he's sure he's alone, Bower talks to Payton again and tells him what happened.
He thinks they should try to contact the bridge, but Payton doesn't think there is anyone left
on the bridge in the first place, and there won't be help coming because this ship wasn't
programmed to return.
Bower gets some of his memories back then, and remembers all about the planet Tanis,
which he saw on tv when he was a kid.
He also remembers having a lover and that the training included allowing the crew members
to bring their wives, so his and Payton's companions should be somewhere on board.
He wants to go out and find them before the creatures do, but Payton points out it would
be impossible to do in a ship this big, so his priority should be regaining control of
the vessel to save them all.
As he looks around, Bower finds some antiriot guns in a closet, so he takes one with him
before asking Payton to guide him through the hallways so he can find the reactor bay
and reset it manually.
When he sees someone passing by, he steps back and hides while noticing his hands are
trembling, which could possibly be a symptom of pandorum, a disorder caused by deep space
and emotional stress that can make a person psychotic.
Payton tells him the story of the old Eden mission, where one of the officers had a psychological
breakdown and, convinced the flight was evil, he evacuated the ship by launching all the
hypersleep capsules into oblivion.
While chatting, Bower continues to investigate the area, unaware that he's being followed.
He finds another body hanging from the ceiling, but to his surprise, this one isn't dead.
Shepard from team four attacks him at first, thinking Bower is one of the creatures, but
Bower quickly reassures him and helps him get off the booby trap.
Shepard knows as little as Bower does about the situation and refuses to follow orders,
but when a bunch of creatures appears at the end of the hallway, they run away together.
Bower manages to hide, but Shepard falls on one of the traps again, so the creatures start
feeding on him.
When Bower tries to shoot one, the monsters finally notice him too and start chasing him
until he falls from a very high platform.
Suddenly, he's grabbed and dragged away into a locked room by another crew member, Manh,
who doesn't speak English.
Communication is almost impossible, but Bower does manage to see Manh's tattoo and discovers
he's from the agriculture unit, so he tells him to wait there while he looks for the reactor,
since Bower is from the flight unit and knows how to handle it.
After losing contact with Payton once more, he makes it to the cargo room, where he's
attacked and overpowered by Nadia, but he's quickly saved again by Manh.
He and Nadia begin a furious battle that Bower interrupts by shooting his gun in the air,
telling them they should all be working together to survive.
They accept after Bower promises them he should be able to fly the ship if he can find the
reactor, so Nadia guides them to the correct way.
They arrive at a door that she can open only when the reactor surges, so the creatures
almost reach them while waiting.
Bower manages to keep them back with his gun long enough for them to enter the room when
the surge finally hits, and he finds the place where Nadia has been surviving all this time:
the embryonic chamber, where they keep the livestock and wildlife repopulation.
They already lost 30% of specimens, and Nadia has lost the other four people she woke up
with as well.
After sharing the fact she's also suffering from partial amnesia, she shares some bugs
with them to have as food.
Meanwhile, Payton continues to hit the door to open it to no avail.
He also starts hearing noises coming from the shafts, making his paranoia worse.
Moments later, from among the wires, he sees a young man emerge: it's Gallo, who is naked
and claims to come from the bridge before passing out.
When he wakes up sometime later, Payton starts asking him questions as he notices his tattoo
marks him as team four.
Gallo explains he had to kill his teammates in self-defense when they were overtaken by
pandorum, and that's why he's covered in blood.
Bower, Nadia, and Manh continue their search for the reactor and cross the hypersleep chamber,
where most capsules lay empty because it's the creatures' main hunting ground.
Manh stays behind, watching something, and Bower wants to look for his wife, but Nadia
explains civilians aren't here, only officers.
As they advance together through the room, the floor under them breaks and they fall
into some sort of sewer filled with human bones.
This turns out to be a good thing for them, however, because a creature arrives then and
isn't capable of seeing them down there.
After the monster is gone, they climb out of the sewer, only to find the monster waiting
for them.
It doesn't hesitate to attack them both, and while at first it keeps the upper hand, the
fight turns around when Manh arrives and gets the creature off them.
By working all together, they manage to kill the monster, but there is another one that
has been watching them all along and now is summoning more of his kind to eat the body
and attack the humans.
As the trio runs away, they notice one of the capsules opening and a crew member waking
up, but there's no time to save him: the creatures quickly surround him and feed on him.
The three of them manage to escape and get inside a barricaded chamber where they meet
Leland, the ship's cook.
While he prepares something for them to eat using the water that leaks into the ship and
the algae it creates, Nadia finally tells Bower her theory: the creatures are the members
of the crew that mutated into these monsters thanks to the accelerator every officer had
gotten injected in them to help them adapt to the environment in Tanis, since this stuff
is supposed to jump-start evolution.
Leland overhears them talking, and since he's been awake for a long time, he knows what's
happened, so he starts telling the story at the same time Gallo tells it to Payton while
trying to make him lose his mind.
When Earth vanished thanks to some unknown catastrophe, the ship got the message that
told them about this tragedy and wished them good luck.
Hearing this news, Gallo lost all hope and became insane, so he killed his team and induced
pandorum in other passengers before goading them into a violent and tribal culture, then
he went back into hypersleep.
Bower and the others lose consciousness as the story ends, only to wake up some moments
later to find out Manh had drugged them and now he's tied them up with the intention to
eat them.
After stabbing Nadia, he moves to Bower, who manages to change his mind by explaining the
ship is on its final stage before shutdown and none of them will survive if he doesn't
reset the reactor.
Manh frees them and lends them his radio so Bower can contact Payton, who checks the computer
memory and confirms the ship only has forty-seven minutes left, he also provides them a path
they can follow to the reactor.
As they cross the hallway, they encounter one of the creatures, but this one is very
young, which confirms the monsters are reproducing.
Nadia asks them not to kill it because it's just a child, but this causes the kid to run
away and alert his peers.
The group flees and hides into a room with all the civilian hypersleep capsules, but
Bower doesn't find his wife there and he finally remembers why: she never came, she broke up
with him and that's why he enlisted in the first place.
This means she died when Earth evaporated.
With nothing left for him to save, Bower starts losing hope and almost loses his sanity as
well, but Nadia convinces him they need to survive and restarts a new Earth.
It's then that Bower has another revelation when he remembers Payton's wife, Mary Anne.
Meanwhile, Gallo continues to goad Payton, trying to make him lose his mind and give
in to pandorum.
He thinks everyone should launch themselves in the pods the same way the Eden mission
did, but Payton considers it suicide and believes Bower can get them out of this.
As Gallo's nose starts bleeding and the argument grows in intensity, he gets more violent as
well.
He grabs a sedative gun and threatens Payton into launching him out in a capsule, so Payton
pretends to follow his orders only to choose hypersleep instead of launching once he has
Gallo inside the pod.
The team makes it to the reactor room, which is also the place where all the creatures
sleep.
When they try to cross a walkway it collapses under their feet, and while Nadia makes it
to the other side, Bower falls on a metal beam, and Manh is left holding the walkway
so it doesn't drop on top of the creatures.
After slowly lowering himself to the floor, Bower covers himself with monster skin to
cover his own scent and carefully makes his way to a nearby ladder.
He does make it to the reactor, but his flashlight falls on his way up and wakes up the monsters,
who waste no time in going after them.
Manh drops the walkway, killing a good amount of them before running away while Bower finally
restarts the reactor, which returns power to the ship and kills a good number of monsters
as well.
The mutant leader goes after Manh to engage him in hand-to-hand combat and after a very
tough fight, Manh defeats it and kills it, only to find the mutant kid seconds later.
He hesitates to kill it, which is a big mistake: the child doesn't think about it twice and
cuts his throat open.
In the meantime, Bower and Nadie are following Leland to safety while the rest of the creatures
chase them, but the cook betrays them and locks the door behind him so he cannot be
caught.
Now the power is back, Payton finally manages to open the bridge door right before Gallo
escapes the pod and, after some struggling, injects him with the sedative.
It is then that Payton's memories completely return and he realizes what has been going
on: he isn't Payton, he is Gallo, and the man he's been talking to was a hallucination
of his younger self.
Payton had been one of the crew members he killed and since Gallo took his capsule, he
thought himself to be Payton because of the amnesia.
At that moment, Leland arrives at the bridge and pretends to be a friend of Bower's, but
Gallo doesn't care: he simply kills him by injecting a sedative into his eye.
After they manage to force the door open and leave the creatures behind, Nadia and Bower
make it to the bridge as well, where Bower recovers his gun from Leland's body and rushes
to the computer to open the flight log, which reveals nine hundred and twenty-three years
have passed since the mission started.
Gallo reveals himself then and admits his lie, which Bower had already discovered, before
opening the shutters on the ship's window to show them is all black - not a single star
could be seen anywhere.
Having lost all hope, Gallo tries to goad Bower into insanity as well, speaking of the
lack of god and law which equals absolute freedom.
However, Bower believes in having law and order, so those words make him react and he
jumps on Gallo, ready to kill him, when Nadia interrupts him with a very important discovery:
there are bioluminescent creatures floating around them.
They finally realize the ship landed on Tanis eight hundred years ago and it's now lying
on the bottom of the ocean.
Gallo takes advantage of the distraction to jump on Bower and try to kill him, but Nadia
comes to the rescue and they start to fight.
Since she's still hurting from Leland's stabbing, Gallo easily overpowers her, so Nadia tries
to get Bower to help her, but he doesn't hear her.
Now it's him the one having a hallucination, so instead of shooting Gallo, he shoots the
wall, believing the mutants are coming.
The shot breaks a window and water starts pouring into the ship, killing Gallo and any
remaining creatures.
Nadia and Bower manage to get into one of the flooded pods, and since the air isn't
enough for both of them, Bower puts the oxygen mask on Nadia's face as the computer launches
over a thousand capsules, including theirs, when it detects the emergency.
Bower and Nadia surface near a beach moments later, and together they watch all the other
pods make their way up as well, which means now they have enough people with them to start
rebuilding a new Earth.