Pandorum

My "Radius Project" of seeing movies in every theater within 100 miles of Fort Collins has gotten off to a moderately slow start, but I had actually planned it that way. Right now, my priority is simply to catch up with the current releases, and so I have been seeing movies in theaters wherever they are showing. If I pick up new theaters along the way, so much the better.

This was the case on Wednesday when I drove over to Greeley in the mid afternoon to see Pandorum, a science fiction and horror movie that has been out for about a month. It had left the theaters in Fort Collins, but it was still showing at the Cinemark multiplex at the Greeley Mall.

I hadn't been in the Greeley Mall in, about, twenty years, so I arranged to go early to give myself a walk through. Like so many malls lately, it has fallen on hard times. In my walk through I counted sixty regular storefronts, out of which nineteen were languishing empty. Of the anchor stores, only two were occupied with full-time stores. Another one was shuttered, and the remaining one was temporarily occupied by a Halloween Party store.

The Cinemark was the liveliest part of the complex. Like its corporate sibling in Fort Collins, it has an ample but plain-brown-wrapper boxlike lobby with a conventional concession counter lining the back wall. The auditorium had stadium seating, but not as fancy as the one in Fort Collins, where one goes up a ramp to the auditorium hallway, in order to allow sunken auditoriums with a steep seating pitch.

I was one of two folks there to see Pandorum on its next-to-last afternoon in northern Colorado.

It had been a while since I had seen a trailer for this movie, and I barely remembered anyting about it, which is a good thing for this kind of movie, as it allowed some fun element of surprise. As I remembered, it is the genre of "deep space" horror movies, that is, about what happens psychological to human beings in the far, dark reaches of outer space. It's a concept that I think is fun to explore on film from time to time. Many folks had compared this to Alien.

To be honest, I was turned off in the first few minutes by the usual rigamarole of predictive programming about the impeding end of the world due to environmental destruction, and how a select group of humans will be allowed to survive it all. I didn't really need the globalist political preaching to go along with the story. Sometime I'm going to have to start talking more explicity about predictive programming in this blog, because I'm beginning to notice more and more of it every time I go to the movies, even though it has been around for many decades.

Otherwise, the story has a nice set-up. Two characters awaken from the deep slumber of cryogenic hibernation. They are alone. Where is everyone else? What has happened to the ship? It's darn good concept for the start of movie.

Slowly the characters discover what has been going on. They meet other characters who explain things to them. An urgency develops by which the characters must act swiftly to save the ship from destruction (the old ticking clock that every suspense movie needs). There are hideous monsters out to get them. Part of the mystery is where the monsters came from.

There are couple juicy plot twists, one which takes advantage (not surprisingly) of the title concept of the movie---"Pandorum" is the name given to the madness that overtakes humans in the isolation of deep outer space. There is also a big plot twist at the end that I didn't see coming at all, but seems to work fairly well in setting up the final resolution to the story.

All in all, I thought this was a pretty good way to spend a couple hours. It's not for everyone---it is indeed a horror movie, and there a few graphically gory scenes involving the monsters.