PANDORUM

'''PANDORUM. Christian Alvart, director, co-writer story.''' Travis Milloy, script, co-writer story with Christian Alvart. UK/Germany/USA: Constantin Film, Impact Pictures (production) / Constantin Film and Icon Productions (UK and German distribution), 2009. For more details on production and distribution, see IMDb. Dennis Quaid and Ben Foster, featured players. Richard Bridgland, production design.

SF/Horror movie, also psychological drama, Grand Guignol (or, less politely, Splatter Film).

Opening of Wikipedia "Plot" summary: "After human overpopulation depletes Earth's resources, humanity builds an interstellar ark, the 'Elysium'. It carries 60,000 people on a 123-year trip to colonize Tanis, an Earth-like planet. The passengers are placed in hypersleep, and a rotating crew wake biennially to maintain the ship. Eight years into the mission, the ship receives a transmission from Earth: 'You are all that's left of us'."

As the film progresses, note: Early establishing shots the giant spacecraft Elysium, which we soon see enclosing a vertical hypersleep chamber, from which chamber Ben Foster's Corporal Bower exits/is expelled with imagery of mammalian birth. Later the hypersleep capsules are seen used as escape pods on another ship and explicitly called "coffins," in which people will die for a nice womb/tomb analogy: cf. and contrast 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (film) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (novel) and the hibernation capsules. For the denouement of PANDORUM ("spoiler" here), the capsules again become escape pods/life-savers, rising from fairly shallow depths to the surface of an alien sea for a final turn of rebirth: cf. and contrast Queequog's coffin in Moby-Dick, perhaps especially as it pops up out of the water in the 1956 film.

Threatening containment within a huge mechanism of Foster and Quaid's Lieutenant Payton early in the film as the ship's systems malfunction.

Lt. Payton's booting up of the control system near the hypersleep chamber by manually turning a wheel a number of times, possibly generating electricity.

Motif of giant ship with very narrow, "claustrophobic" spaces, Industrial/Brutalist in design, where one might encounter a living spider, feral-looking or cannibal mutant humans — cf. and contrast THX 1138 — or a dead or apparently dead human body.

Cpl. Bower's going through the ship, tracked on computer by Lt. Payton: cf. and contrast similar tracking in ALIEN (film), another film with water rather oddly raining down or leaking from above (the ship has some form of artificial gravity).

Modernist, if a bit messy, part of the ship holds an archive of genetic material of Earth's biosphere, so "This ship truly is Noah's ark," with the genetic samples suspended in what look like test tubes, seen through windows in the shape of the seemingly inevitable hexagons.

Repetition of birth imagery with the image as seen by Lt. Payton (see Wikipedia Plot summary for clarification) of a naked or nearly naked Corporal Gallo in a fetal position, covered in slime, amidst cables (?) that look like a nest of headless snakes.

Pushing a point, Cpl. Bower (unsuccessfully) pursuing his wife can be seen as an Orpheus and Eurydice motif, ironically played out in a high-tech Elysium spacecraft in the heavens which is also a variation on Hades/Hell. Later Bower is near the end of his quest to reset the ship's reactor, finally with "a descent into hell itself"; note motif of descent into an underworld, for which cf. and contrast, e.g., Ripley's descent toward the climax of the ALIENS (film).

Deep in the bowels of the ship, there is a kind of huge cesspit with human waste, at least partially literally: at least one human hand. Note Leviathan motif, for which cf. and contrast the Book of Jonah and more directly A NEW HOPE (initially released as STAR WARS).

This is a usefully derivative film, and what we have termed "recombinant cinema." Parodied in The Simpsons: "Thanksgiving of Horror".

RDE, Initial Compiler, 25Nov19, 8Dec19