I've been getting all faux-creative this past week, or so. Working with the digital camera, screwing around with my collabo-cuz Ky, making more of these worthless photoplays.I've already completed two, and have ideas for at least two more. We just do these because it's fun for us. We make these photoplays for our own amusement. I post them to YouTube as an afterthought. Nobody watches them, and it doesn't matter.
The online versions aren't the originals, anyway. I cut the plays to a lot of licensed music, whatever I can to find to illustrate the fractured themes of the "narratives". And when I upload them to YouTube, I have to replace the licensed tracks (for the most part) with whatever suitable music I can find with their AudioSwap service.
The only photoplays that YouTube allowed on the site intact are "Hat Lander" and "The Christmas Miracle". And hardly anybody watched them. Oddly enough, "Invasion!" still has the largest number of views, at 238. And that one has a horrible-sounding AudioSwap version of Fats Domino's "Blueberry Hill" for a soundtrack. Go figure.
But hey, if you do want to view any of these mediocre attempts at entertainment, once again I direct you to my YouTube Channel here: http://www.youtube.com/uncleoflies . Watch something, leave a comment, tell me I'm a humorless monkey and that I should stop wasting my time with this trivial nonsense... whatever floats your boat.
Moving on...
I watched "Pandorum" on DVD the other evening. From the producers of "Event Horizon"!
Whatever the fuck that means.
I'm not sure exactly what to say about the movie. I wanted to see it in theatres when it opened last September, but that was a bad month for me, so I never got the chance. Hindsight being what it is, I am now glad that I missed the theatrical opportunity.
It's not that "Pandorum" is a bad movie. It's just... mediocre. And that's worse that being bad. You can mock bad. You can laugh at bad. Mediocre just pisses you off.
I like Dennis Quaid, and I like Ben Foster, and they're both wasted, here.
Dennis Quaid spends 90 minutes sitting in a chair, talking to himself (spoiler!), and then he drowns. Ben Foster crawls through some ducts, meets Norman Reedus, watches Norman Reedus get eaten by mutants 30 seconds later, wanders around with some boring feral scientist chick, and then he doesn't drown.
The NTEs from James Cameron's "The Abyss" make a cameo appearance, which is fun.
SPACE MADNESS: The Movie isn't particularly entertaining.
I guess I could recap the plot, or something...
Planet Earth is dead. The whole planet. Apparently, it blew up. But that's not important.
The starship Elysium is traveling through the cosmos, acting as an Ark for the flora and fauna of the poor, doomed planet Earth, traveling to the Earth-like planet Tanis on a 123 year mission. Thousands of human beings are in hypersleep, with a handful of flight crews being thawed out in succession to man the bridge for extended tours of duty.
Ben Foster's Corporal Bower wakes up from with hypersleep-induced amnesia, and rouses his flight commander, Lt. Payton, played by Dennis Quaid and his beard. Together, they try to figure out where they are, what their purpose is on this ship, and why the ship's reactor is slowly shutting down.
Payton sends Bower out through the ventilation system of the massive Elysium, to get the reactor back online. Bower's adventures begin with the ill-fated Norman Reedus and a pale, mutated human with a blowtorch strapped to his arm. He meets a boring feral scientist, and some warrior fella with a spear who doesn't speak English.
They decide to follow the Yellow Brick Road to the Great and Powerful Reactor. The warrior will ask the Reactor for a shiny new knife. The feral scientist will ask the Reactor for talent. And Ben Foster will ask the Reactor to get him the fuck out of this movie.
On their way to the reactor, they all meet a crazy old man who seems to know a lot about the dark history of the Elysium. He tells them that after the last flight crew learned of the destruction of the Earth, one of the crew members lost his shit, succumbing to "Pandorum", and killed his superiors.
He then decided to wake up a bunch of the crew members, releasing them into the Elysium, and over time, the unleashed humans tranformed into pale monsters.
Their transformation came about because of some vague mutagenic fluid they were all exposed to while in hypersleep, administered to the crew in order to help them adapt more quickly to the alien environment of Tanis. But set loose in Elysium, they all evolved to survive on the ship, instead.
Yeah, it doesn't make a lot of sense.
After Bower convinces the crazy old guy not to kill and eat his new friends, they all set off to reset the reactor together.
Meanwhile, Dennis Quaid is slowly losing his mind, talking to some crazy young man named Gallo, played by Cam Gigandet. I hate that name. The guy seems like a decent actor, and I have nothing against him. I just hate that name. Gigandet. Jesus.
Bower fixes the reactor with his super reactor-fixing skills, and he makes his way back to Payton...
Or should I say Gallo? Bwa ha ha ha!!! That's right, kids!
It seems that Dennis Quaid is the young Corporal Gallo, the man who lost his mind and iced his superiors, loosing a plague of ravenous ship-mutants upon the Elysium! This whole time he's been talking to himself. And I guess when Dennis Quaid was a young man, he looked like Cam Gigandet.
Gallo decided to put himself on ice once more, when he got bored with his mad little experiment, and it took him a while to remember who he really was. But now that he does remember, he's craaaazy! Not "entertaining" crazy. Just kind of "boring" crazy.
Bower confronts Gallo, and Gallo opens a big window on the flight bridge, dropping the second twist on your already-boggled mind.
Elysium is underwater!? Whaaaa?
Yeah, the ship landed on Tanis centuries ago, but the flight computer fudged the landing. So the Elysium crashed into the ocean.
At this point, the mutants catch up to our heroes, the warrior duels with one of the brutes, survives, then gets killed by its bastard spawn in a perfect example of why you should never get distracted by big puppydog eyes. It just gets your throat slit.
Dennis Quaid just kind of gives up and sits back in chair while Ben Foster shoots the big window, cracking the glass and sending the alien ocean spewing forth into the Elysium. Quaid drowns, but he's too busy thinking about what he's going to eat for lunch to care.
Foster grabs his girl, jumps into his hypersleep pod, and it is jettisoned to the surface. Foster and Boring Feral Scientist smile as they watch the beautiful alien sunrise, joined by thousands of other jettisoned pods bobbing to the surface of the ocean.
Pan to a picturesque waterfall and... cut to black.
Christ, this movie is just not good. It pained me to type that little plot synopsis. The film is too fucking dark. Many times, it was almost impossible to make out what was happening onscreen. The sets are drab and unispiring.
The monster designs are lazy. They look too much like the villains in "Ghosts of Mars", and that is not a good thing. The plot is thin at best, and it plods like nobody's business.
The film is 1hr 48m, but it felt so much longer than that, at least to me. I was glad when those credtis rolled.
I had such... middling hopes for you, "Pandorum".
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