Spaced out

Director Christian Alvart, whose other film released this year was the competent horror-thriller Case 39 with Renee Zellweger, unfortunately seems out of his depth when it comes to delivering on writer Travis Milloy’s intriguing premise here, which is at its best at the film’s beginning and end.

We’re in the year 2174, and Earth has become uninhabitable due to overpopulation.

Behemoth spacecraft Elysium is en route to begin colonization on Tanis, the only other planet thus far found that is able to sustain human life, when Corporal Bower (Ben Foster) and Lieutenant Payton (Dennis Quaid) awake from their hypersleep with, curiously, no memory of why they are aboard or what their mission is.

Gradually, their memories begin to return but, as Bower heads deeper into the ship’s dark dank depths, where he hopes to be able reset the reactor so that they can continue their journey, it becomes increasingly apparent that something else is on board, and it may very well not be human.

Fair enough, stop me if you’ve heard something similar more than a few times before, going back as far as It! The Terror From Beyond Space (1958) and also including a little-known avant-garde sci-fi/horror by the name of Alien (1979) but, in fact, the highly derivative aspects of Pandorum (2009) are not its weakest suit, with Alvart showing at least a more-than passable understanding of the genre(s) in which he is working.

The set-up’s initial intrigue provides more than a few shudders, and viewers are drawn in by Foster and Quaid’s credible take on struggling to regain knowledge of who they are but, unfortunately, as is so often the case, the suspense generated over slithering horrors to come is far more effective than the revelation of what actually stalks the ship.

However, its denouement, which plays some truly adroit games with expectations and delivers bigger scares than the film’s tepid centre section, is just about worth waiting for – a pity that, this section excepted, directorial courage appears to have deserted Alvart.

108 mins. In English, Vietnamese and German.