Read the rest of this review at Cinema Sentries:here

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The Ivy League professor Bill Kincaid (Edward Norton) goes home to Little Dixie, Oklahoma after having been informed that his twin brother Brady (Edward Norton) has been killed. It’s obvious that Bill really isn’t all that keen on the idea. He has worked hard at distancing himself from his humble beginnings and his complicated family and is on his way to a successful career with an offer to teach philosophy at Harvard. It turns out that Brady has gotten himself into trouble with a rival drug dealer. The twins Bill and Brady have chosen very different paths in life, as you might deduce from that alone.

Things get more involved from there on out. Bill and Brady’s mother, Daisy Kincaid, played by the lovely and talented Susan Sarandon, has checked herself into an old folks’ home, despite being far too young to go that route. It’s also obvious that Brady’s interest in perfecting his method for growing top quality weed (yes, that is the reference to grass here) has been inspired by his hippie mother. Brady’s best friend Bolger (Tim Blake Nelson) meets Bill at the airport and drives him back to Bill’s place via a local store where they get into an altercation with two local thugs. It’s not until they arrive at Brady’s place that Brady actually makes an appearance and it turns out that the rumours of his demise were greatly exaggerated. Brady needs Bill to guarantee that he has a solid alibi when he goes to confront the rival dealer Rug Rothbaum (Richard Dreyfuss).

The main crux of the story is all about home and family, and it is in those moments that it really shines, like the beautifully played scene between Daisy and Bill where you get to see what it was that drove Bill away from home in the first place. Underpinning it all there is a deeply philosophical strain, something that shows the blatant intelligence of the characters as well as the writing. The love interest for Bill is a local teacher/poet Janet (Keri Russel) who quotes Whitman while gutting a catfish. There’s a charming incongruity there, same as there is in the scene between Bolger and Brady where they discuss the existence of God, and Brady makes an analogy between the existence of a god and the concept of parallel lines that just run on and never touch.

“And man can’t create true parallel. It’s just more of a concept… Well that concept, that perfection, we know it exists and we think about it, but we can’t ever get there ourselves. I think that right there is God.” Brady tells his pothead best friend who he met in prison. It’s that kind of contrast that colours the whole movie.

There’s a clear acting challenge to playing your own twin, and even if it is an old device and it has been done before, it takes an extreme awareness just with little things like making it seem like you are actually interacting with your other, and Norton makes very intelligent choices throughout with things like body language and quirks of behaviour that actually makes a good enough conceit that the viewer isn’t constantly reminded of the technical side of how this is done, rather than letting the action unfold. There are enough similarities between the characters that you get reminded of their sameness as well as their difference, most notably in the obvious intelligence of them both.

There’s a dark undercurrent in the narrative, drugs and violence and a dysfunctional family dynamic, but all that serves a purpose and there’s deadpan humour to so much of the dialogue which flaunts an interest in philosophy and rhetoric that makes it difficult to pigeon-hole. I, for one, happen to like that. I like that there is pathos to the humour, a darkness underneath that gives contrast to the lighter things. There is, quite simply, a lot going on, and there is a body count worthy of a gangster movie and just desserts to deserving parties. The end result is something that feels more like a play in its aesthetic. It’s quirky and morally dubious, well acted and unpredictable in a good way. That’s more than enough for me.

Article first published as Movie Review: Leaves of Grass on Blogcritics.

There’s a prophecy (isn’t there always?) that a boy will be born who holds the mythical cure to the curse. On his thirteenth birthday the moon will go blood red for three nights and then it will all be over. Unbeknownst to his mother, Rachel, young Timothy is that boy. The small town they live in is aware of this, and they protect mother and son from the opposing forces that come in the shape of Varek and his pack: Zo, Sonya and Grenier.

This is actually a werewolf movie, hence the title Skinwalkers, though those two beasts are not necessarily synonymous. The plot is fairly straight forward. The good werewolves want to be cured from the curse and they don’t eat people. The bad werewolves want to keep going and they do eat people. The twist there is that once you eat human flesh you get corrupted to the wild side.

The basic premise is pretty thin, but it could work, given that it turns out the leader of the bad wolves, Varek, is actually the brother of the leader of the good wolves, Jonas, as well as the father of the boy he’s looking to kill and the husband of Rachel, so we get a little free Cain-and-Abel action thrown in. So the big question is: with all this, and snarling fights, and guns and knives and fisticuffs and elongated canines… why doesn’t it work?

I like werewolves. I like the idea of the Id run wild, the beast within, and I generally enjoy the working class nature of them. The problem here is that this turns into a shoot-out a few too many times and there’s not enough wolf in these wolves to satisfy me, personally. There’s blood and meat galore, a noble quest and an evil villain, but there’s still next to no dramatic tension. I’ve said before that for these kinds of movies it helps if the actors play it straight, taking their roles seriously. The actors of all this seem to do that, but there’s just not enough meat on the bone and sometimes that just makes the acting… bad. The end result is surprisingly bland and run-of-the-mill pulp horror clichées, though there’s certainly enough sex and violence to satisfy the Id-side of the myth. The actual transformed werewolves don’t really work for me either. There is a reason, beyond the influence of the moon, as to why we never get to see them in direct light.

There is a complete and total lack of pack dynamic to the interaction between the two werewolf cadres that leaves me mystified. Most werewolves on screen travel alone, so there could have been something there to explore, but there’s hardly even any regular interpersonal dynamic and that’s just too bad. The bad guys are traveling on motorcycle, so we could at least have had a little “bad to the bone” moment with all the leather and cut off denim they’re wearing, but instead they come across as four posers who can’t remember weather or not they’ve already racked their shotguns.

The most incredibly stupid plot twist occurs at the very end, though, when the cheap Sarah Connor rip-off Rachel forgives and forgets everything the redeemed and delivered Varek has done in order to travel with him and use their sons blood to cure werewolves any- and everywhere. It’s one of those moments when you have to curb your instinct to throw popcorn at the screen and let out a howl of your own. There are so many things wrong with that notion that I actually won’t bother ranting about it, it’s that bad.

Exposition is generally pretty insulting to this viewer, but even more insulting is superimposing the images of the actors over the transformed werewolves in case you can’t figure out who is who. Again, I have to rein in the impulse to hurl popcorn at the screen. All in all, this is not worth wasting your time on if you want good quality growl for your buck.

Article first published as Movie Review Skinwalkers on Blogcritics.

The father is played by an exceedingly thin and haggard-looking Viggo Mortensen and the Boy by Kodi Smit-McPhee. Because these two are the main protagonists a lot rides on the report between them and it works surprisingly well. One of the main themes of this particular story is the love a father has for his son, the lengths he’s willing to go to to keep him alive and safe. Another theme is how to keep your humanity in a world where rape and cannibalism are real options for survival.

The father and the boy leave their home to travel south in a world where everything has died and the temperature keeps dropping. The animals are gone, the vegetation is dying and the sky is darkened by huge ominous clouds. Not only do the survivors have to worry about scavenging humans, they also have to try and stay alive through bitter cold, earthquakes, wildfires and falling trees. No explanations are given as to what actually happened, but it doesn’t really matter. The uncertainty adds to the sense of overall vulnerability of the few survivors that are still “carrying the fire” and trying to be good guys.

The boy’s mother (Charlize Theron) opts out before the man and the boy leave their home to go south. She simply can’t handle it anymore, something the viewer is showed in flashbacks. She does not want to just survive, so instead she walks away, literally. She takes off her hat and coat and heads out into the freezing night, committing suicide by simply giving up. The father can’t follow her, because of the boy, but the threat of murder/suicide looms large over the pair symbolized by a revolver with only two remaining bullets. Death is still better than being raped and eaten and the gun is kept as a kind of talisman to ward off a fate worse than death.

The wondrous thing about all this, no matter how bleak the circumstance, how hostile the environment, is that there are moments of light and hope, like when the pair find a survival shelter full of supplies when they are right at the brink of death by starvation. Every single human being they encounter is a potential threat, though, and that adds to the oppressive mood. On the road they meet many bad people who are trying to kill and eat them, but they also meet an old man (Robert Duvall) who is merely trying to stay alive.

There is also other things to contend with, like the fact that the father starts coughing and keeps getting progressively more ill as they travel on. There is the distinct sense that he only keeps himself alive to keep the boy alive and in that way the boy becomes a symbol for his hope for humanity. It’s all very grim, but the relationship between the boy and the father is still depicted as loving and above all profoundly important as a means of how to stay human, and keep some humanity intact.

This is not a hugely sentimental tale. The dialogue is restrained, the landscape viciously bleak, the characters constantly dwarfed by the mere scale of the devastation and the interaction between them is tinted by that. The only scenes given richness of texture and color and warmth are the dream sequences showing what life was like for the father and mother before the event. They are a startling contrast and serve mostly to exacerbate the horror of the now. They also act as a reminder that the boy was born after disaster struck and therefore has no idea of what life was like before.

The devotion between the father and son is sincere, but there’s no doubt that the father is moribund. The main question seems to be how to retain your humanity when faced with overwhelming odds and how to go on after disaster has struck. All McCarthy’s novels are deeply language driven and The Road is no exception, spare to the point of terseness. It’s difficult to translate that into moving images and not lose something vital, though this does a decent job of that. The color desaturation and the choice of locations, it all helps to give the scale of the destruction. This tale also ends on a strangely hopeful note, in a way. It’s not that anyone is going to live happily ever after, but more that life will go on as long as there are those that are “carrying the fire”. Sometimes that is really the best you can hope for.

All in all this is well worth watching, but it’s not easy fare and it’s not supposed to be, which you are well aware of if you’re familiar with the unrelenting nature of McCarthy’s fiction.

You’ll find what I thought of the book here;

http://librarianmule.wordpress.com/2008/03/26/on-the-road-in-dystopia/

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Article first published as Movie Review: The Road (2009) on Blogcritics.

My latest review of the vampire movie Stake Land (2010) by Jim Mickle can be found and read at Cinema Sentries.

Check it out here:

http://cinemasentries.com/

Teaser:

In a parallel and immediate now, disaster strikes and a pandemic hits the world. Vampires take over, for any given value of that when they actually don’t retain any higher brain function other than the basic predator-feeding instinct. That does not mean they are not extremely dangerous, because they certainly are.

Mule

I get the sense that a part of the aesthetic behind all this is borrowed from the Shakespeare plays that are so heavily referenced in the story. The stages and costumes and the very showiness of the setting is a bit too much to be considered realistic. The actual performances of the plays within the play are not naturalistic, but rather very formal and contrived. Something of the naturalistic comes through in the very last performance of Othello and Desdemona that Maria and Kynaston give, and it’s done well enough that the entire house is so quiet that you could hear a pin drop. All this is very interesting, in a very art as a symbol for itself and woven through itself and using itself as a metaphor kind of way.

Also, the ban of female actors gets revoked through some very physical convincing from the King’s mistress, Nell Gwynn (Zoe Tapper). The King, played with a kind of decadent whimsy by Rupert Everett, inverts the whole world of the stage by forbidding male actors to perform female roles and thusly pulls the rug out from under the feet of the notorious Kynaston. Maria gets her shot at the stage, and more importantly, at Desdemona.

Through a series of mishaps and miscalculations on Kynaston’s part, he goes from being in the highest honours on the stage, with a noble patron/lover, the Duke of Buckingham (Ben Chaplin), and royal backing since the King is fond of theatre, to living more or less as a drunkard destitute mockery of himself on the less discriminating stages that mostly entertain the lower classes.

There are many themes in this piece, everything from class issues to gender issues and meta structural components that highlight the contrast between modern and post-modern presumptions on the actual playing of a role within a role, to the more rigid ideas of particular gestures adhering to a specific emotion on the restoration stage. It is a game of masks and identities and it could presumably keep a scholar busy for a while, but even with all that intellectual stuff there to keep the mind occupied, there is still something unformed about the central core of the narrative. For me, personally, I think it has to do with the way what happens to Kynaston is presented as a comedy of errors as well as a tragedy. Billy Crudup gives this performance an arm and a leg and a cynical twist that hides a sensitive heart. Clare Danes is good enough to be able to portray an actress who is frankly not always very good, which is difficult in and of itself. If anything the subject matter can be derived at as the malleability of gender and everything that goes with that.

I would have preferred that to be played slightly less for comedic value and more with some kind of serious intent. Take Maria’s performance as Desdemona the first time she does it, for instance. She models her acting completely on Kynaston’s. She is a woman playing a man playing a woman. That is more than complicated enough for me to cringe inwardly when she gets seriously mocked on stage for doing a bad job of it. That is more than enough fodder for thought without it being played for slapstick value. So the wit is occasionally like that of Shakespeare, who had to compare with bear-baiting and decidedly less gentile amusements when he wrote his plays. Presuming he did write them, if we want to be post-modern about the whole thing. The rudeness of the comedy is somehow at odds with what the there could be at the centre of it all this.

It is still well worth watching. The costumes and settings are sumptuous and gritty at the same time, Crudrup’s performance is impressive and there’s a nucleus of doubt about the value of hereto-normative certainties and the sometimes crude wit is entertaining and occasionally cringe-worthy. All that adds up to a slightly confusing, but entertaining spectacle. And that’s good enough for me.

Stage Beauty (2004) directed by Richard Eyre stars Billy Crudup (Ned Kynaston), Clare Danes (Maria), Tom Wilkinson (Betterton), Ben Chaplin (George Villiars, Duke of Buckinham), Hugh Bonneville (Samuel Pepys), Rupert Everett (King Charles II), Richard Griffiths (Sir Charles Sedley), Zoe Tapper (Nell Gwynn), Edward Fox (Sir Edward Hyde).

Article first published as Movie Review Stage Beauty (2004) on Blogcritics.

The story is told in reverse order, starting at its most brutal and bloody point. It is not the catharsis of justified violence that you can sometimes find in action and thrillers. The way the viewer is introduced into the narrative seems so random and incongruous that your curiosity is awakened along with a sense of foreboding, even if things are already about as bad as they can get.

The scene is set for the unraveling of something inevitable. The only question left is what has led up to this point. The key players are Alex (Monica Bellucci) and her boyfriend Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and their friend Pierre (Albert Dupontel) and the bad guy Le Tenia (Jo Prestia). When when enter the action a man has been brutally beaten to death in a local gay fetish club. As the event unfolds themselves in reverse the viewer is led through the inferno of the the club through a mad search through Paris for a man called Le Tenia and further back to the brutal assault on Alex and then even further back to a party and the evening before the party. The end, which is the chronological beginning, is actually a beautiful idyllic setting in a park where Alex is sitting in the sunshine surrounded by children and families, reading a book. The very last scene, the coda which is the beginning in reverse order, states simple “Le temps detruit tout”, time destroys everything. It seems like a pretty trite piece of wisdom, but after having been through the descent into the very nethermost regions of hell and the lowest representation of human nature, it is still poignant.

The camera pans wildly every time the scene is about to change, every time the viewer is taken back one step in time, in a dizzying three hundred and sixty degrees spin. It is not pleasant to watch, rather it becomes a harbinger, something that heightens the sense of dread and foreboding. The reverse order of events also means we start at the meanest, darkest point and move toward lighter better things. That does nothing to soothe the sense that things have gone awry in an irreparable way, that the three main characters lives are never going to be the same, that something has been so badly broken that it can never be put back right again.

That is what the violence does, in this particular narrative. The vicious assault on the lovely Alex, played excellently by Monica Belluci, is definitely one of the most difficult rape scenes I have ever seen. The static camera is unrelenting, as is the violence, and it doesn’t give the viewer any reprieve in a tactful averting of eyes. Not only is the viewer asked to bear witness to the violation, the aggressor Le Tenia also beats Alex to a bloody pulp before he is done with her. It might seem like this could be gratuitous, but the problem, or the brilliance of it, is that it is too realistic, or maybe even naturalistic, to be in any way something that caters to an objectifying gaze.

The resulting chase through the underbelly of the French gay scene in search of Le Tenia shows an increasingly fraying Marcus followed by Pierre, who starts out as trying to be the voice of reason, though that ends up being a terrible miscalculation. The fact of the matter is that revenge is a loser’s game, not surprising, and it’s so utterly pointless in this particular narrative that there really is no reprieve for neither the characters, nor the viewer.

Not all movies mean to tie up everything in a nice big bow of morality and easy lessons. This is a brutal, dark, harrowing tale that shows how something can be so thoroughly broken that it will never be put right and that events can turn even the most unassuming protagonist into what he himself despises. The fact that the story is told with such passion and artistic daring only drives that home. And it is daring to make something as provocative and unpleasant as this, something that intends to upset and nauseate the viewer through its use of camera angles, a grating, harsh soundtrack and an unflinching approach to brutal, sadistic violence.

This is a difficult movie to watch, both in content and in artistic style, and it stays with you once the screen has gone dark. Thought provoking and controversial content means you have to be willing to take on the task of sitting through a narrative that is not going to leave you unmoved, but that is in no way easy fare. If you are willing to do that, though, this movie will richly reward you.

Irreversible (2002) is directed by Gaspar Noé and stars Monica Bellucci (Alex), Vincent Cassel (Marcus), Albert Dupontel (Pierre), Jo Prestia (Le Tenia), Philippe Nahon (L’homme), Stéphane Drouot (Stéphan), Jara-Millo (Concha).

Article first published as Movie Review Irreversible (2002) on Blogcritics.

It’s well known that Ree’s father cooks methamphetamine and that he’s been in trouble with the law before. Now that he is missing and the immediate safety of her family is threatened, Ree goes looking for him, asking a lot of uncomfortable questions of some very dangerous people.

Ree is shown right from the start as self-sufficient and strong in the sense that she does what has to be done. In her case that means taking care of her mother and her siblings, chopping wood and hunting squirrel and trying to make ends meet. There are poignant instances where Ree is taking her siblings to school and then looking in through the doors of the classrooms with something like longing in her eyes, showing plainly that she knows what she has to give up for her family.

Ree goes in search of her father, talking to relatives and people her father has had dealings with all over the community. She forms an uneasy alliance with her volatile uncle Teardrop (John Hawkes) in trying to get to the truth, though it’s pretty clear right from the get-go that her father is gone for good, if not dead.

One of the more interesting things about this story is that even if the culture is portrayed as predominantly and pretty aggressively patriarchal, the women are given a lot of weight and substance. Most everywhere Ree goes she is greeted at the door by the wives and girlfriends of the men she has to ask questions of, and they are all cast in the same tough-as-nails Cerberus dye. The region’s patriarch Thump Milton (Ronnie Hall) is guarded by his spouse Merab (Dale Dickey), who also delivers an almighty beating to Ree when she won’t stop her investigation.

This is a tale of family, perseverance and doing what has to be done and Ree is undoubtedly a heroine in the most basic and best sense of the word. Jennifer Lawrence gives her portrayal of Ree all the gravitas and subtlety you could hope for, showing both her strength and her weakness, her fear and her deep and abiding sense of loyalty without it ever becoming overly sentimental. This could so easily have tripped into a stereotypical portrayal of degenerate hillbillies and gratuitous poverty porn, but instead each character is shown as doing what they have to do in order to live under extremely harsh conditions. Some manage to rise above their circumstance and some succumb to them. Drugs are in abundance, both as a means of making money and for everyday use and this is presented as a fact of life. The harsh things are snugged up right against the gentle in this tale. The landscape and the color palette shows just how bleak and difficult life is, and it also shows the undeniable haunting beauty of the scarcity of the mountains.

This is a thriller in the best sense of the word. The object is to find out what has happened to Ree’s father, and the viewer is taken along for the ride right up to the inevitable conclusion. What makes this rise above the run of the mill thrillers is that the devil is in the details all the way. The dialogue is sparse, the characters kept true and given context and depth even though they are not explained to death. In amidst of all the violence and danger we are also shown how Ree’s little brother and sister run and play and seem genuinely happy to be together, with no sense that they are deprived of anything essential.

There are visually lyrical moments that underscore the characters themselves without intruding on the story, sometimes in black and white and sometimes in a muted colour scheme that adds to the overall impression created in the narrative. It is gripping and harrowing and reminiscent of true Southern Gothic tales underscored with a sense of almost documentary quality frankness, which makes it well worth watching.

Winter’s Bone (2010) directed by Debra Granik stars Jennifer Lawrence (Ree), Isaiah Stone (Sonny), Ashlee Thompson (Ashlee), John Hawkes (Teardrop), Valerie Richards (Connie), Shelley Waggener (Sonya), Garret Dillahunt (Sheriff Baskin), William White (Blond Milton), Lauren Sweetser (Gail), Dale Dickey (Merab), Sheryl Lee (April), Marideth Sisco (Singer at Party) and Ronnie Hall (Thump Milton). Based on the novel of the same name written by Daniel Woodrell.

Article first published as Movie Review Winter’s Bone on Blogcritics.

Shelter opens on the forensic psychiatrist Cara Harding (Julianne Moore) who seems to have a special interest in multiple personality disorder.. Her evaluation of a criminal who has obviously pleaded insanity sends the gentleman in question to the electric chair. Subsequent conversations between her and her father Dr. Harding (Jeffrey DeMunn) quickly reveal that debunking presumed sufferers from multiple personality disorder is something of a speciality of Cara’s. She is yet to be proven wrong in her estimations. That’s where David (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) comes into the equation.

Dr Harding presents Cara with this interesting patient, a young man in a wheelchair who has been found on the street, lost and without any recollection as to how he wound up where he was. What starts as an interesting battle of intellects between Cara and her father quickly turns into something else when David starts switching personalities. His alters, Adam and Wesley, make appearances and Cara is starting to have to question her iron-clad beliefs and assumptions.

So far so good. I am actually with the story up to this point. Multiple personality disorder is a very much discussed phenomena and it’s been pretty thoroughly debunked, but it makes for great entertainment in this kind of setting. The problem here is that this is where this story veers off into the supernatural. People start dying in gruesome, horrendous and very specific ways while Cara investigates the various alters of David only to find that they all existed, and that the young man is not so much disturbed, as possessed.

Okay, fine. I’ll roll with it. So he is possessed and not disturbed. It isn’t until we wind up in the mountains with a bunch of shaggy-looking mountain people and an old hag with the ability to suck a persons soul out and then put it back in that the atmospheric scenery and all-in-all pretty solid performances no longer outweigh the frank silliness of the basic plot. I can’t put my finger on exactly what it is that makes this too hard to swallow, but I think it’s in part the fact that we started out on fairly solid ground with sharp-witted dialogue and an intriguing concept and suddenly find ourselves in a stereotypical back-water village in the hills that seems to belong in a Tales from the Crypt episode.

David turns out to be a priest whom the mountain witch “Granny” (Joyce Feurring) has put a curse on so that he now has to provide “shelter” for all those souls that have lost their faith in god. That’s the reason why so many different personalities are living in that one body. Then, for whatever reason, David starts going after the various members of Cara’s family and some of her acquaintances as well. It ends up becoming a battle for the souls, with Cara’s daughter, Sammy (Brooklynn Proulx) as the main damsel-in-distress.

There’s a definite risk with making a movie that has a slight case of multiple personality disorder itself. It’s a mystery and a crime story and a thriller and a horror flick all in one, and it switches between these different language codes in a way that could have worked, could have been clever. The performances are strong throughout, Julianne Moore delivers, as does Jeffrey DeMunn as her father and Jonathan Rhys Meyers in the various incarnations of whoever is in David’s body at the moment. The problem is more that this devolves into a fairly trite horror movie, nothing particularly original about it, and the twist at the very end isn’t surprising, or even mildly upsetting, at least not to this viewer who saw it coming a mile away.

It fails at going into some of the basic archetypal fears that could have made it truly frightening, like the inherent instability of the human psyche, something we rely no being more writ in stone than it really is, and opt s instead for a vague kind of religious gloss of the old fire-and-brimstone variety, which, again, would have been fine, if it had any kind of lead-in other than the gruesome deaths of the people occupying the preacher’s body. Even the Witch Of The Hills is an archetype that could have been unsettling, but here she isn’t even set up in opposition with the basic Christian morality she is supposed to act in contrast to. Instead it all comes down to having faith in a standard issue Christian god, especially when the chips are down, because if you don’t a rogue damned and hill-witch cursed preacher is going to come and kill you. See what I mean? It doesn’t make sense and it doesn’t keep any of the promises it made in the opening. This movie is quite simply not as clever as it would like to be. I wouldn’t waste my time with this one.

Shelter (2010) directed by Måns Mårlind, Björn Stein stars Julianne Moore (Cara Harding), Jonathen Rhys Meyers (David/Adam/Wesley), Jeffrey DeMunn (Dr. Harding), Frances Conroy (Mrs. Bernburg), Nathan Corddry (Stephen Harding), Brooklynn Proulx (Sammy), Brian Anthony Wilson (Virgil), Joyce Feurring (Granny Holler Witch), Steven Rishard (Detective Danton), Charles Techman (Monty Hughes) and John Peakes (Dr. Charles Foster).

In Pandorum (2009) Bower (Ben Foster) one of the crew members of the Elysium wakes up from his hypersleep only to find that the ship does not seem to be in very good shape. There are no lights, no other crew and no welcoming committee. The initial scene is surprisingly painful to watch, more like a birth than a peaceful awakening. It is clear that Bower does not remember where he is, or why, but all his technical knowledge and his mission specific skills are intact. Shortly after Bower’s awakening another crew member, Payton (Dennis Quaid) wakes up to the same confusion.

They set about trying to contact their superiors, figuring out where they are and what’s gone wrong with the ship. It’s not as easy as it seems.
Elysium is overrun with vaguely humanoid carnivores that may have started out human, but have now evolved into something more primal. They hunt in packs and they more or less have the run of the ship. Their favoured prey is the newly awoken crew members that emerge from their sleeping pods and summarily get eaten. There are still bigger problems, though. First of all, the reactor is acting up and needs to be manually restarted. Secondly, the ship has received a transmission that Earth is done, gone and over, and the ships crew is all there is left of mankind. Thirdly, there’s a space sickness called Pandorum which affects those that have been in suspended animation for too long. Or those that have been in space for too long. It starts as the shakes and graduates into full-blown paranoia and violent tendencies.

Elysium was on its way to Tanis, the only habitable planet in reasonable reach, when it launched and now there’s literally no way of telling where she is or if she’s just lost in deep space. Bower sets out for the bridge to try and open the door to the room he and Payton find themselves in when they wake up. The monsters roaming the hallways try to eat Bower a couple of times until he forms a tentative alliance with Nadia (Antje Traue) and Manh (Cung Le) a couple of crew members that have been awake for a while and managed to stay alive. Restarting the reactor becomes a more pressing matter half-way through this little jaunt.

In the end it turns out things are even more complicated than that, of course. The maneaters are probably a result of genetic enhancement meant to help the crew in their biological transition to their new home planet. The ship is run by a madman, one of the officers present when Earth’s last transmission was received, and a victim of Pandorum. Or maybe just megalomania, who knows? The ship is where it was supposed to be and not where is was supposed to be at the same time, meanwhile; this viewer is mostly going “huh?”at this point.

The environment is atmospheric, I will give it that. The mise-en-scene is darkly gorgeous. I like The Elysium, in all it’s gloomy, overrun, beleaguered and begrimed glory. It’s not one of those pristine, white and shiny ships, which I like. There’s an impressive sense of scale to it, too, without it losing its claustrophobia. The monsters mostly leave me indifferent. They’re fast and vicious, but the actual hunting and fighting feels a little too much like a computer game for me to invest too much in it. You can probably argue that gravity is different on board a spaceship, but still.

Both Ben Foster’s and Dennis Quaid’s performances are surprisingly layered and played straight, which definitely lends this the gravitas it needs not to descend into complete pulp fiction. The movie is ambitious, but maybe that is part of the problem. It wants to scare the viewer with dark things hunting the hero through long, dimly lit corridors, supply a creeping psychological horror and question the way memory works and the effects of long distance space travel. It’s a veritable cornucopia of fears to tap into, claustrophobia, loneliness, alienation, memory loss, fear of the dark and the things in the dark that can eat you, what we are reduced to when pushed to extremes, cannibalism… The overall effect is surprisingly un-frightening, though. There are better movies in this genre, like the Alien-movies, Solaris, Sunshine, 2001: A Space Odyssey just to mention a few obvious ones.
This is still good enough to merit a viewing, but it isn’t all it could have been if it had sharpened its focus a little and not tried to overreach itself.

Pandorum (2009) directed by Christian Alvart stars Ben Foster (Bower), Dennis Quaid (Payton), Cam Gigandet (Gallo), Antje Traue (Nadia), Cung Le (Manh), Eddie Rouse (Leland), Norman Reedus (Shephard), André Hennicke (Hunter Leader), Friederike Kempter (Evalon), Niels-Bruno Schmidt (Officer).