Ten Statements About....PANDORUM (2009) (and a few words about the Loews Village 7)

Dennis Quaid searches for the agent who gave him such bad
career advice

1) If you're going to entrust someone with shepherding humanity to its new home, you can do lots worse than Dennis Quaid.

2) It's nice to see that the Crawlers from The Descent have survived well into the future.

3) No, really. This film owes so much to Neil Marshall's cave-dwelling opus that director Christian Alvart should be writing Neil some checks for co-writing the damn thing. There are some scenes--like the one where Ben Foster's Bower and Antje Trau's Nadia have to hide in a pool where the Crawler-like thingies throw their discards--which are direct lifts.

4) Norman Reedus is the Antonio Fargus of our time, even if his character bites off of one from Neil Marshall's Doomsday. No pun intended.

5) I didn't realize that Antje Trau was German until I realized the film was a German/American co-production. I honestly thought she was an Australian with a weird voice.

6) Perhaps the biggest thing going for Ben Foster as an actor is his ability to look like anyone he needs to. I didn't connect him to the Stranger in 30 Days of Night or the Angel in X3 until I called up his imdb page. The fact that he was naggingly familiar but not readily so actually helped with the veracity of the film's world.

"Aren't you supposed to be in a cave somewhere?"

7) I like how that, even though these creatures sleep under a honking big, presumably nuclear reactor, the script ascribed their generation to good ol' fashion genetics gone wild.

8) Maybe it's just because I've watched far, far too many movies of this type, but two of the major beats in the film--including a massive one concerning the identity of the main antagonist--are telegraphed far, far too early and can be pieced together by the audience far, far too easily.

9) I do like how the film teases that both of its leads suffer from Pandorum, a psychological disorder related to the effects of 'hypersleep,' which throws into doubt everything we learn from both Quaid's Payton and Foster's Bower in the first act. Likewise the fact that extended hypersleep supposedly causes the sleeper to experience massive memory loss. Granted, once one of the aforementioned beats gives the identity of the antagonist away, this aspect is lost completely.

10) There is something very refreshing about a film that's unapologetic in its R Rated-ness in this world of PG-13 horror.

In short. while I more than appreciated the fact that this film wasn't afraid of appealing to adults as opposed to the teenagers of the world, it is rather flawed. The derivative nature of the story does interfere with the flow, and Alvart needs to learn more about concealing your plot twists. But still...it's another science fiction film that's not a remake or a franchise, and there's something to be said about that.

This, by the way, was the first time I've been in the Lowes Village 7 for some time, and I was pleasantly surprised. In an effort to attract matinee audiences, the theater has instituted a '$6 Morning' policy of charging six bucks for any show that starts before noon, actually seems to put the trailers that make sense before the movie (Oh, and the people who are remade The Stepfather? Terry O'Quinn and Donald Westlake should take turns kicking your ass...), and have an actual Classic Movies Program on Sundays! Check them out.

Ten Statements About....LEGION (2010)

"Raaaar!  I's A monsta!  A MONSTA!

1) Wow....Dennis Quaid playing a folksy patriarch type that made mistakes but loves his son....I haven't seen him play that before....rolls eyes

2) There's nothing quite so annoying to me than a stupid film that keeps insisting it's smart.

3) That being said, there are moments where I can envision that this was a smart script early on (very early on) in the pre-production. But along the line whatever smartness got trimmed out in favor of more gunfire and fighting and CGI special effects.

4) Wow...Charles S. Dutton playing an older black man with a strong spiritual side...I haven't seen him play that before....rolls eyes

5) When I first saw the trailers, I worried that this was going to be a bald-faced, Micheal-Bay-ized rip-off of The Prophecy. In retrospect, the producers were too busy ripping off Night of The Living Dead and Terminator to care about a lesser film like that.

6) There is no sense of these characters having any life outside the movie proper. No one here has a personality, they have 'types' that are differentiated by the types in other films by traits...but those traits are never explained. For example--why is Dutton's Percy missing one hand? It was set up to be a character beat, but ended up never being explained.

One of the actors discovers one of the gaping plot holes just
over the horizon....

7) If there's a flaw that, if corrected, would have lifted this film up from being just mediocre, it's that screenwriters Peter Schink and Scott Stewart just asks us constantly to 'go with it.' It's not just enough that we're told Adrienne Palicki's Charlie is about to give birth to a child that will save humanity; we need to know (much as Sarah Conner is told in Terminator) how he's going to do it. It's not just enough that we're told that Jeep (Lucas Black) has to find 'The Prophets'; we need to know who here prophets are--and telling me to buy a comic book isn't going to work. These might be the parts that were trimmed to make room for the punchy-punchy-run-run.

I am the overkill of The Lord!

8) Okay, let me get this straight--these Angels have razor-sharp wings, fight like freakin' Neo, and have this Swiss Army Mace that does everything, including spins like a top? I know the producers must have thought it was cool...but when that thing starts doing its julienne impression, I couldn't stop laughing.

9) The sudden re-appearance of one character thought dead at the climax effectively stops the character arc of Jeep (Who calls their son Jeep, by the way?) dead. His journey is never finished, which makes the final scene of him and Charlie playing at being Sarah Conner at the end of Terminator ridiculous.

10) You can take John Tenny's Howard, bite out his throat, snatch him away, and nail him to a cross before giving him his ticket out of the movie...but it in no way distracts from the fact that the two people who definitively die first are the only two people of color in the movie.

Overall...mediocre, mediocre, mediocre. It's a dumb film that mouths bullcrap about 'faith' in an attempt to convince you it's smart, asking you to just 'go with it' rather than work out the mythology that should be a major element of any film like this.

Other than enduring this, the other moment was cringing through....grumblemutter.....Regal's Firstlook when it gave me a chance to preview When In Rome. At one point, Kristen Bell describes her character as a 'workaholic with no time for romance'--at which point we cut to a scene where Bell's character describes herself to a friend as 'a workaholic with no time for romance' in almost the exact same terms...and my heart froze a little. I fear Ms. Bell may be lost to us.