It’s terrifying enough to wake up on a spacecraft with no memory of anything! What if you discover that the spaceship is inhabited by cannibalistic monsters? “Pandorum,” a 2009 British-German horror film with Lovecraftian themes and a survival adventure, is the subject of the narrative.
Pandorum is defined as “a hypothetical slang name for a type of psychosis termed Orbital Dysfunctional Syndrome or ODS produced by deep space and provoked by emotional stress,” according to the description. Cristian Alvart directed the film, which he co-wrote with Travis Milloy.
The film follows two astronauts who awaken from a profound hyper-sleep unprepared, bewildered, and with no recollection of their history. They soon discover that the ostensibly uninhabited spaceship is swarming with cannibalistic humans. According to horror lovers, the film is underappreciated, and it did poorly at the box office. Dennis Quaid, Ben Foster, Cam Gigadet, Antje Traue, and others star in the film.
Travis Milloy’s initial script was based on the Pandorum, a prison ship that was transporting hundreds of Earth’s most wanted criminals to another planet. However, the inmates turned into cannibal hunters.
Milloy was skeptical about the storyline and chose to make a low-budget movie with unknown performers. The story piqued the interest of directors Paul W. S Anderson and Jeremy Bolt, who forwarded it to Impact Pictures, who gave it a thumbs up. When director Alvart received the piece, he was taken aback by the story’s resemblance to his own writing, “Nowhere.”
Milloy enthusiastically agreed to Albert’s decision to integrate the two scripts. The trip of “Pandorum” had begun. The picture was created on a $33 million budget but only grossed $20.6 million at the box office. Let us now begin to piece together the tale of Earth in the year 2174.
World’s End, Fear Survives- Pandorum Released in 2009
Before the movie started, the audience was informed that the earth’s population was 6.76 billion in 2009, and the Kepler Telescope had been deployed to look for other Earth-like planets. Paleo 17 arrived on the habitable planet Tanis in 2153, at a time when the Earth’s population had risen to 24.34 billion people.
In the year 2174, the battle for earth’s limited resources had reached its highest point. Spacecraft Elysium was launched. The first scene informed the audience of a message received by Elysium from the world, which said that they were the last existing humans present and may God protect them.
The following scene stated that an astronaut named Comrade Bower had awoken from her sleep unexpectedly. Though he was first bewildered, he gradually began to recall a few details, particularly his training. But he couldn’t recall his goal or where he was going.
Soon he was joined by Lieutenant Payton, who was as disoriented as Bower. But the pod with Cooper’s name on it was vacant. The numbers tattooed on their arms indicated their group number, but there was no trace of any other person there. Bower suddenly remembered that he was an engineer. There was a power problem, and the nuclear reactor needed repair.
While Payton stayed at the command center and supervised Bower, he dispatched him to find a route through the vents and learn more about the spacecraft. Bower found crawling inside the vent to be quite challenging due to the abundance of tubes. He became claustrophobic and started panicking when he suddenly reached the end of the vent. But as soon as he lighted the glow stick, he was horrified to see the decomposing corpse of Cooper.
He landed in a boot storage compartment but was cut off from Payton’s contract. He was suddenly confronted by a lady, Nadia, who attempted to open the door but fled. Soon after, Bower came upon another dismembered corpse hanging from a tree, and the lady assaulted him, stealing his provisions and shoes before fleeing. From a hidden place, Bowel could see strange, pale, scar-covered humanoid creatures called Hunters. The corpses were devoured by the strange humanoid monsters. The bowel was petrified as he described his terrible experiences to Payton.
Payton’s memories began to return slowly as he remembered the goal of their journey. He remembered 60000 people being divided into groups and transported to the planet Tanis to settle. One group was meant to wake up after a few years and brief the other. Bower remembered his wife and families of the crew, who had been allowed to travel on the same spaceship. He became desperate to find her while Payton convinced Bower to repair the reactor at first to restore power and other safety measures.
Bower discovered another guy hanging while he searched for the reactor, but this man was alive. Bower lowered himself by cutting his rope. He was Shepard, and he belonged to a different group. Soon after, he began to coat his body in oil to mask the fragrance of a human person, but they were soon pursued by the Hunters. The creatures were fast and fierce, while they had sharp weapons.
Bower tried to shoot the creatures, but a glass door blocked his shots. Shepard was captured, disemboweled as the monsters fed on him. They noticed Bower and started chasing him, but Bower ran into a man named Mahn, who helped him escape from the cannibalistic Hunters. Bower couldn’t understand Mahn’s language, but he understood that he belonged to the agriculture crew from his tattoo.
Nadia fought Bower once more, but this time Bower persuaded her that they needed to activate the reactor or no one would live. Nadia later disclosed that she was a German scientist who had spent seven years preparing the earth’s ecology for the journey to Tanis. While they proceeded towards the reactor, they were again attacked by a monster, while it took the efforts of three of them to slaughter the creature by repeated stabbing. While some creatures started eating the dead Hunter, the others again chased the trio as they managed to escape.
Meanwhile, Payton ran upon Gallo, who claimed to be on his way off the bridge before passing out. Bower, Nadia, and Mahn were looking for a path to the reactor when they came into a hermit named Leland, who provided them some algae-based sustenance. Back on the center, Gallo confessed that he had to kill two of his crew members as they were suffering from Pandorum. Both Leland and Gallo revealed the events that had converted the passengers to cannibal monsters after planet earth ceased to exist. But we will explore that in the next section.
Meanwhile, Leland gassed the trio with the intention of consuming them, but Bower persuaded him that without the reactor, none of them would live. They looked for the reactor and eventually found it in the family section, where Bower intended to see his wife. But suddenly, he remembered that his wife, reluctant to join him in his mission, had died with the rest of the people on earth.
With this revelation, Bower became paranoid as he lost all hope for the task. Finally, after a lot of hardship, the group found the reactor. Bower started the reactor, but a monster child killed Manh.
Meanwhile, Gallo grew upset, and Payton was preparing a drug to calm him down. The story’s twist emerged as Gallo and Payton struggled over the sedative. Gallo had hallucinated himself into believing he was Payton all along, hence the person who appeared as Payton up until now was Gallo himself.
Gallo had murdered Payton a long time back when he had developed Pandorum, on hearing earth no longer existed. Gallo went for his hyber-sleep in Payton’s pod. Hence, he believed himself to be Payton after waking up with amnesia. Bower, in the meantime, remembered what Payton looked like and knew that Gallo had been responsible for playing mind games with the passengers.
Gallo’s lunacy had progressed to the point that he was antihuman. He sought to persuade Bower to live a primal lifestyle rather than the sophisticated one that was responsible for the planet’s destruction. Bower had been lying about being stranded in space, it was eventually revealed.
The flight log showed that they had been on the ship for 923 years, and it had crash-landed on Tanis 800 years back inside an ocean. The monster creatures were not passengers but their descendants who had evolved into new species as they continued the game that Gallo had started. Bower started hallucinating as he almost succumbed to Pandorum.
When Gallo attacked him and Nadia, Bower fired a shot that cracked the window. As the water began gushing in, Bower and Nadia just, in time, managed to lock themselves in Bower’s pod as Gallo, Leland, and the cannibals drowned in the water.
As the water surged into the spacecraft, the ship began an evacuation sequence as all of the pods lifted above the ocean. The film ends with the warning that Tanis’ population will be 1213 people after a year. Bower became a legend in Tanis’s history.
There have been so many remakes and reboots in the sci-fi horror genre that coming up with new concepts is difficult. Pandorum, on the other hand, has succeeded in telling a distinct narrative in its own way.
The kind of madness people suffer after spending prolonged time in space has been depicted with incredible performances and film set designs. The generous twists and turns of the movie make it a spine-chill, exciting watch. It isn’t very reassuring to see such well-made films flopping at the box office.
Cannibalistic Monsters from Pandorum
While hunting for the nuclear reactor, Bower came upon the first humanoid Hunter, as they were known in the film. The sight of the beast consuming a dead body terrified him. Bower then ran into Shepard, who was also hanging but alive. Shepard tried to hide his body odor from the beasts by slathering oil over his entire body. They were finally pursued by the Hunters, who were swift and had keen weapons.
Unfortunately, Shepard could not be saved from the Hunters as they killed and ate him. Bower was confused about the origin and behavior of these monsters. When he met Nadia, she informed him that the Hunters were actually passengers. While in their sleeping pods, everyone was injected with an accelerator enzyme to speed up the adaptation process and avoid the evolution process to adjust to the conditions of Tanis.
She believed that instead of Tanis, their body must have adapted to the spaceship. Bower asked her why she, Manh, and Leland had been spared from the adaptation. Nadia said that probably the creatures had been in the ship for a much longer time than any one of them. But ultimately, Leland and Gallo revealed the truth behind the Hunters. Leland knew about the facts as he heard them from the accounts of other passengers and the drawings made on the walls.
After the news came that the earth had mysteriously come to an end, and the people who were on the spaceship Elysium were the only humans left, Gallo started getting paranoid as electric sparks appeared around his head and his nose started bleeding. These were the symptoms of Pandorum. As Gallo suffered from Pandorum, he began playing nasty games with the other passengers as he would become both ”God and Devil” to them.
He sent some passengers to the cargo hold as they would perform the same games as the Hunters did. Gallo stopped believing in civilization which, according to him, led to the destruction of the planet earth. He was more comfortable with the wild, primitive lifestyle of human beings.
Their games included hanging each other on ropes and then cutting open their stomachs and finally eating them up. The drawings on the walls also revealed that many passengers were grabbing their heads as electric sparks appeared around them and blood poured out of their noses.
Many passengers thus were driven mad by Gallo, and Pandorum was the root cause of the cannibalistic behavior that sprouted on the ship. During the course of the film, we witness an incredible twist as we realize that there was no Lieutenant Payton. Payton had been killed by Gallo, a long time back. After being satisfied and bored with his games, Gallo again went for her sleep in Payton’s pod.
That is why, after waking up with amnesia, he believed his name to be Payton, as was written on the pod. Gallo was so involved in his games and hallucinations that he even didn’t realize that Elysium had already crash-landed inside the ocean of Tanis. The truth was that these creatures were not any mutated form of the passengers.
In fact, these Hunters were not the passengers but their descendants who had evolved into new species with due course of time. As the following generations continued playing the game that Gallo had introduced to their ancestors, the resulting species evolved into the terrible cannibalistic Hunters.
Gallo had been so insane with Pandorum that he had no sense of right or wrong. He made himself the master and slayer of humanity and was ready to kill anyone disobeying him. Fortunately, only the sensible and moralistic people survived at the end, and all who had become evil and immoral were wiped off. Thus, life on planet Tanis once again proved the theory of ”Survival of the fittest”.
Why should you watch Pandorum?
We’ve all seen how a picture with a mediocre narrative and mediocre performance can make a lot of money and get a lot of attention. Here’s an example of the polar opposite. We have a great narrative with some outstanding performances. Yet, the film is a significant flop.
Though the movie has developed a cult follower, who keeps requesting a sequel of the film, the disastrous result at the box office has canceled any probability of a sequel. The film is a perfect balance of horror, thrill, and suspense, making it an excellent watch and offering just about everything a horror fan wants in a sci-fi, Lovecraftian, survival adventure.