Pandorum falls in the large gap of mediocrity most movies nowadays do, leaving you with mixed feelings and with the impression that you haven’t completely wasted your time watching it, but you can’t put your finger on any of its features and call them brilliant. It’s common and easily forgotten.

The plot is simple, as the rest of the movie: in the future, the human race, facing extinction, sends into space towards a recently discovered planet that resembles Earth, a large colonization space ship. Due to malfunctions to the cryogenic sleep systems, a large part of the human cargo suffers mutations and turns into a cannibalistic life form with superhuman strength and enhanced predator abilities. A small group of survivors fights to save both ship and its decimated cargo, but to make matters worse some of them suffer from Pandorum, which is nothing more than glorified form schizophrenia triggered by prolonged hyper sleep combined with emotional trauma.

Seeing the name of Dennis Quaid in the cast gave me hope because I have always considered him to be part of that group of actors that are not as famous as Pacino not because they lack talent, but simply because somehow luck eluded them. Pandorum seemed to be another unfortunate choice for Mr. Quaid since most of the time he is a voice others hear or he’s shown talking to them through voice-com (read “talking to himself”). Ben Foster on the other hand has all the freedom and the attention one could have hoped given the story, but fails to impress.

The settings are so dark, rusty and dusty that sometimes you feel that the whole thing takes place in some abandon factory, not on a state of the art space ship, the pinnacle of human technology. If we could talk about special effects, I could say the setting comes to cover up some of their flaws, but the truth is we can’t. There’s only handful of them throughout the entire movie and whenever they pop on the screen you feel like yawning. The makeup of the monsters is decent, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t a couple of situations where you can see right through it. Add all this up and you can easily imagine how completely lost is the whole horror feeling on which a lot of the movie’s scenes were designed and created.

As I’ve said, from every point of view, the movie rests in comfortable gray area in which it demands nothing from its viewers and in the same time it gives little back.