For the next five minutes I kept thinking that I didn’t want to be taken out of there in an ambulance [fool] and just hoped everything would be alright. It took me a few minutes but eventually I felt much better and told the trainer I was ready to start the workout. I knew I wasn’t back to 100% because the whole time I had this ring of fragmented light around my left pupil, following me everywhere. That lasted about another two hours and then it disappeared [and I never heard from it again…] I feel very old.
Pandorum
Overall:
First, I have to say, they got a sick poster.
Second, the whole premise of a sci-fi horror such as this one, you know, the “OMG I’m stuck on this ship in the middle of nowhere and there is a monster after me,” I think works in this movie. It is entertaining even if the formula is pretty standard. I do wonder about the end. We find out the ship at reached its destination a very long time ago and that it had been resting at the bottom of the ocean all this time. So they were not lost in space after all. Although it was pretty creepy when they look out the ship and saw what they thought was space but without stars, just blackness … Really creepy.
We get a Hollywood ending! The last two people to survive being awake on the ship manage to trigger the release of the “life pods” [don’t remember if that’s how they called it] there is nothing ambiguous about the ending, everybody is supposed to wake up floating in this alien ocean, ready to restart the human race, Yeah! After all that stress and darkness, we get all this light and happiness.
Eden [the ship]:
What a lame ass name for a ship. I mean, it’s not like we haven’t heard this one a thousand times …
The only thing I can say about it is that we have a ship that looks and feels old but in the “future" and that's always cool. It feels claustrophobic and [paradoxically] gigantic at the same time.
The characters:
Other than Dennis Quaid, everybody else was pretty much “standard” and expected. Dennis was the creepy one. Although the “mutants” were not bad either, I wasn’t very impressed, just disgusted and when we find out that they are actually reproducing, I almost vomited right then and there.
The existential questions:
The only think that really hooked me up and made me actually have a conversation or two about the subject was the issue of humanity as a concept. What makes us human? Or to be more precise, what gives us our humanity?
Are we born with it? Or what makes us who we are, “human” is our environment and the context that gives us boundaries onto which we develop consciousness. When Dennis Quaid finds himself confronted with a reality where he is alone on a ship, lost in some weird black-space, with no hope, he becomes his own god, boundless and omnipotent. I just found that notion intriguing. Of course, it always ends badly.
Two days after watching this movie, I saw an episode of Star Trek:TNG called "Homeward" (season 1.) Not a very good season, but in this episode, they violated the first directive and revealed themselves to a man who lived on an isolated planet where they didn’t even have electricity. Of course Beverleyyyy cannot erase his memory because of his unique physiology [it always happens like that of course] and Picard cannot send him back without risking even more disruption. Anyway, in the end, the man tells Picard that he has lost everything that defines him. He’s lost all that gave him an identity and the Picard and eventually he kills himself because he can’t adapt.
Weird.
No comments:
Post a Comment