It was a little weird, and a lot creepy, and I'm not entirely sure I 100% understood it ...
Okay, confession time: I only saw, like, the last hour or so, because mon famille decided to watch it without me. (I'm not offended by this; usually, when they get a new DVD, I often choose to skip it for various reasons, the most common being it's just not something I want to watch, which is fair enough, right?). So maybe I didn't really understand what was going on, and I missed all the exposition telling my why these people were on a spaceship and why they had no memory of anything, and what the hell those creepy blue humanoid monsters were - which, the reveal? Shouldn't have come as much of a surprise - and to be honest, I'm not all that fond of the damn film anwyay.
Okay, let me back up a sec. I don't want to rehash the plot here, but basically, Earth becomes too over-populated, and they send out a contingent of military/science/medical types - and their spouses? I think? I'm still not clear on that point - to colonise a new world ('Tanis') that's just like Earth. Only something goes wrong (naturally) and our heroes wake up from suspended animation with no memory of anything (which comes as a surprise to all, I'm sure). There don't seem to be many people running around, but there are these freaky blue guys, and as we all know, outside of Avatar, freaky blue guys are Not Good. One guy, Bower (played by Ben Foster, according to IMDB), is trailing around the ship trying to get to the reactor core (or something) so he can reset the ship - maybe? I don't even know - and his CO, Payton (Dennis Quaid) is trapped in a room somewhere outside the bridge, or whatever. Later, a guy who doesn't speak English turns up (played by Cung Le), not that the language barrier presents any kind of problem for our hero Bower, who pretty much understands him immediately; and then a chick wielding a knife accosts them (played by Antje Traue). I have no idea what their names are, or where they came from, and after watching the film, I still don't know. Anyway, they traipse across the ship, then find a black guy who's Crazy with a capital C (played by Eddie Rouse) (although everyone in this film has questionable sanity), and chains them up for ... Torture? For the freaky blue guys? I'm still not sure. But Bower convinces him the key to their survival lies in reaching the reactor core and doing whatever technical jiggery-pokery they have in mind to fix the ship. So the crazy guy lets them go, leads them to the reactor core and ... Stuff happens, and people die, and I don't want to spoil the ending for those who actually care about it.
Suffice to say, it's not my favourite film of the year.
But.
I ... really want fic. Like, really. And there is none. Which makes me want to write some.
Of course, what I really want is porn. And if the ending had allowed it, well ... Let's just say I'd be ficcing pretty hard right now. And I must've been reading too much slash or something, 'cause damn, now I see it everywhere. There was some ho-yay between the non-English guy (his name is Manh; I think he's Vietnamese), a really strong threesome vibe between Bower, Manh, and the chick (whose name, IMDB informs me, is actually Nadia), especially during the scene where they kick the crap out of one of the blue guys. And then there was the weird vibes between Payton and this guy who turns up halfway through the film, named Gallo (played by Cam Gigandet, and he is pretty). (For those of you who don't want to be spoiled, skip the rest of this paragraph and you'll be okay). I was slashing them without reservation - at least, I was until the reveal, where it turned out that Payton was suffering from Pandorum, which is a psychological condition that you get from being in space or suspended animation too long, that he was the one who basically screwed up the mission a few decades previously, and that 'Gallo' was the manifestion of Payton's younger self. Which, really put a spanner in my fic idea, where they get nekkid and screw like monkeys for the forseeable future. I hate it when a fic idea gets Jossed before I've even had chance to put pen to paper (metaphorically speaking, in this tech-savvy world).
So yeah. That's really all I have to say about Pandorum. I suspect if I'd seen it from the beginning I might have enjoyed it more. I hate not knowing what's going to happen in a film.
As for fic, I just might go the AU route, who knows. And anyone who's seen the movie, please, tell me what you thought. I'm interested to know how other people felt about it.