Tuesday, October 06, 2009

Pandorum - 108 lost minutes

So there's 108 minutes of my life I won't get back. Those minutes were spent in the vast interstices of the interstellar spacecraft Elysium, carrying thousands of deep-sleep colonists to a new planet. As is traditional in these ponderous, derivative, dystopian SF movies, the ship resembles nothing more than a spaceborn version of a vast council high-rise on a gang-ridden run-down estate. All is gloom, narrow garbage-strewn tunnels and intermittent power cuts. Around every corner and behind every dripping grating lurk crazed mutant zombies who need their fix of human flesh. There are lots of fights.


After 50 minutes of a mindless quest to 'find and reboot the reactor' interspersed with loud-but-non-frightening mutant-action scenes I whispered to Clare "Let's get out of this stupidity."

To my amazement she was dismissive, transfixed - "No, I want to see what happens!"

Yeah, right.

We all escaped the spacecraft at minute 107. We duly went off to the next-door Asda store to buy some cat-food. I had no such culinary expectations for the 1,213 lifepods deposited with no supplies on an utterly bare target planet, the last surviving humans in the universe.

Clare's verdict: "I wouldn't recommend it but ... it was OK and I've seen worse."