Pandorum

"Don't fear the end of the world, fear what happens next"

Pandorum showed up on the radar sometime in 2008, the trailer circulating online and picking up a lot of interest.

The trailer revealed little of the plot, but it hinted at a compelling tangle of madness and isolation that I really wanted to see more of. It promised that Pandorum was an example of that rare and powerful genre: the SciFi Psychological Thriller.

Plus Dennis Quaid is usually a fairly safe bet, so I looked into it.

Pandorum is directed by some German guy who I've never ever heard of, and written by Travis Milloy. You probably remember him as the author of such international cult classics as "Just Like Mona" and "Street Gun".

Ha ha, no, you don't. You've never heard of those movies, no one has. You've never even heard of Pandorum, don't lie to me.

Well, I have, so let me begin your education: More than anything else, Pandorum is a disappointment. Far from being a psychological thriller, this movie is a mess of monsters and dimensionless characters bumbling through a shoddy script, building up to a climax that is impossible to care about. It's just bad Action-SciFi, plain and simple.

Pandorum is what happens when a studio dumps money on a weak science fiction script penned by some guy who writes obscure urban dramas. All the shiny special effects and compelling advertising only serve to make you feel let down by the flaws, the errors, and the rampant clichés.

I was expecting Moon, and I got Farscape. The old bait and switch. Well played.

If you just want to watch some standard science fiction garbage, this movie will do just fine. It's poorly written, competently acted, and generally forgettable. According to IMDB, "the movie was originally planned to be shot on video as a low-budget feature for $200,000, in an abandoned paper mill with unknown actors".

And you know what, that just about says it all.

Don't think I'm leaving it at that, though. Want to hear what I thought of the rest of the movie and don't really care what gets spoiled? Well, gentle reader, this is your lucky day!

The text in the beginning is super tiny, which may not have been a problem in the theater, but it is when you're watching it on DVD. It's all back-story for the plot, so I guess maybe they're hoping people won't read too closely. It says something about how we screwed up the earth and then fucked off into space, and that's a pretty standard setup for this kind of thing. If there's anything we're good at as a species, it's ruining things.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

The hardest thing to believe about that isn't that we utterly wasted the resources on earth, it's that we were bright enough to figure out how to leave afterward.

Wait, hold on a second, back up.

Ok, ruining things and making babies. So I guess that's two things.

24 billion people on earth? Food supplies are "scarce"? No shit.

How are we producing a giant galaxy-hopping spaceship at this point - to say nothing of the interstellar fleet we seem to have puttering around - while living in apartments made entirely of spotless white plastic? The entire earth would be under third-world conditions with that kind of population, but somehow these people are living in giant iPods.

I don't know, whatever. It's the future, maybe Science magically solves everything. The point is everyone who isn't dead is apparently on the ship now, but it's all dark and empty.

Well, empty except for this one guy wrapped in a giant lubricated space condom inside a big glass tube, and he wakes up and starts freaking out. I probably would too.

Feelin' seeeexy.

The name on the glass tube reads Bower, and there's a bar code tattooed on his forearm. The only other things in the tube aside from lots of catheters and things is a photograph of a beautiful blond woman.

The photograph is printed on space-age transparent plastic because photo paper is sooo two hundred years ago, and Peak Oil never happened!

Having been successfully reminded that he is in the future by his fancy space-photo, he wanders dazedly for a bit before finding the locker with his name on it and retrieving his uniform.

Bower clearly has no idea what is going on, and from the puzzled way he regards the photo and the uniform, it seems he has no memory of them or anything else. He looks like shit though, and amnesiac or not, that's no way to walk around.

He goes to have a shave, and the future punches us straight in the face with his Laser Shaver (tm). It looks exactly like a regular shaver, but it magically erases whiskers when you wave it around near your face.

Eat shit, Mach 3.

You can see it really well from pretty much any angle you please, the director made sure there are like four mirrors there.

Suitably groomed and dressed, Bower brings his superior officer Payton (Dennis Quaid) out of stasis and tries to help him pull off his slimy condom skin, but Payton is cranky and won't let him. Perhaps because it seems his memories are likewise gone and he's been asleep for eight years with tubes shoved in every available orifice.

Bower leaves Payton behind and ventures out into the rest of the ship to look for answers. After a tense ten minutes of creeping around Aliens style, Bower crawls through some ducts in a fairly realistic way, busts through a grate, and promptly loses radio contact with Payton.

Just as I am at the edge of my seat, a martial arts master woman with half of a shirt and a crazy space knife flips in from stage left and attacks Bower for no clear reason. Is she a part of the flight crew? Or like... a Klingon or something?

Maybe awkward handsprings and kicks to the chest are like the future version of a high-five.

She holds a knife that she bought at DragonCon to his neck for a while and babbles in Elvish while I'm trying to figure out what's going on. Then she hears a sound and vanishes into thin air in the empty corridor. Like Batman.

Somehow. And I thought, for the first of many times: There had better be a good reason for this.

It isn't long before we find out why she ran away because a gross alien, like a Protoss with leprosy, stalks down the corridor towards Bower and sniffs around.

Is that... clown makeup? What the hell, man?

He moves like an orc from Lord of the Rings, but in bad stop motion. I'm not sure what the logic was behind that particular directorial decision, but it was funny to watch and I appreciated it.

Bower, of course, runs away. When he gets to safety, he regains contact with Payton and explains as well as he's able that shit has, by all accounts, gone bananas. From this discussion I learned that for all their laser-toiletries, people in the future still say "fuck" and "wild goose chase". 24 billion of them have eaten everything on the planet. Do they even remember what geese are? Or what wild means? But I digress.

The main thrust of the conversation is that: oh no! The reactor is gonna blow. IN LIKE AN HOUR.

WHAT CONVENIENT TIMING, GOOD THING YOU JUST WOKE UP AFTER EIGHT YEARS JUST IN TIME, YOU SHOULD GO AND FIX THAT.

Perhaps recalling how handily the ninja chick handed him his own ass, or how he ran like a pussy from the leper-clown, Bower drops by the armory and picks up the most awesome Nintendo Power Glove ever a nonlethal anti-riot gun that straps onto his wrist.

Shit just got real.

There are plenty of other weapons, but satisfied with this defensive measure, he walks away.

Wait, there are more Power Gloves there, Bower! Why are you only taking one? You have two arms! Augh, you stupid dick. You're going to regret your poor decision making skills.

Immediately Bower runs into more gross aliens, and has to run away and cry about it because his glove turns out to be next to useless. He gets about a hundred feet before WHAM, another ninja guy shows up.

Hey, um, ninja. Are you sure you guys are in the right movie.

Oh hey deja vu.

So this guy is all flipping around, sticking to walls and whipping a space spear around, and takes Bower down without a lot of effort. This really must be getting embarrassing for Bower, because I don't think he even knows why everyone keeps beating him up. I sure don't.

And where are all these ninjas coming from? Well, this one has a barcode tattoo that says he's part of the agricultural division of the flight crew. He's a farmer! Yes, that makes sense.

They soon come to an understanding that Bower is some helpless asshole who doesn't want to fight anymore, and ninja guy offers his help on the mission to save the ship. Having gotten his ass kicked twice, Bower logically decides he "has to do this on his own", and tells the Farmer of Death to stay put.

What? By yourself? You do? Why?

It doesn't really matter, because right away the knife lady shows up and beats him up again. If she doesn't become the love interest, I'll eat my laser space hat. It's a science fiction movie, that means the requisite badass hot chick who doesn't wear bras or whole shirts, and by the end is usually just an empty desperate womb for the hero to fill with his triumphant seed.

It's a proud day for everyone involved.


She fights the other ninja for a bit, and then they all decide to get along. The woman offers to guide them to the reactor, and Bower has reevaluated his lone wolf position, because he agrees. Ninja woman immediately says: "Careful, and don't slow me down."

That's kind of a dick thing for a guide to say, I thought. Don't slow you down? Where the fuck are you going in such a hurry? You're fired.

Also, she speaks perfectly good English and maybe just didn't feel like it before when she was babbling at him in Dwarvish. It isn't really addressed why she switches languages, but at least this way we can find out why she's such an unstoppable fighting force.

Oh, of course, she's part of the genetic sampling team! I was planning on double majoring in biology and ninjutsu myself, but then I remembered that that's stupid.

There's not really time to ponder it all, because they're attacked again right away! By this same guy again, and his other ugly friends!

I think he's just mad that he doesn't have his nose. He's like Voldemort's ugly cousin.

10 points from Space Gryffindor

Bower promptly drops the riot gun that was strapped firmly to his wrist, and as that singular gun was his only weapon, he is immediately knocked down again and starts regretting being so stupid.

There's quite a bit of fighting and running, actually, but it doesn't really matter. What stuck with me was the first big twist: the explanation of these stupid hunt-monsters that Scienceninja McHotpants serves up.

The aliens are actually the passengers, who have mutated because enzymes in their blood "jump-started evolution" and caused them to adapt to the ship, instead of their new home planet as planned.

What. Monsters are "evolved" passengers?

Jump-start evolution? With blood enzymes? What does that even mean?

Do they not understand how evolution works, with the whole natural selection over generations thing? One person can't "evolve", they mutate. They certainly wouldn't all individually mutate in exactly the same way, acidentally. And the whole point of this evolving thing was to make Mankind evolve to live on Tanis, but Tanis was selected in the first place because Man could already live there.

So, that's stupid even if it made sense, which it doesn't, so we'll just move to the next bit.

Even if they could all spontaneously mutate into a new race adapted to the ship, this is the environment the ship presents:

• Constant dark.
• Limited resources.
• Extremely limited water and food.
• The only food source is captive, frozen meat.
• No natural predators.
• No bathrooms that I'm aware of.
• Lots of empty corridors, shipping crates, and ducts.
  

So what to they evolve into? A sedate, quiet race that conserves nutrients that they filter from the surrounding air and use a minimum of energy.

Haha, I'm kidding. They evolve into crazy frenetic man-hunters, obviously!

OH NO. REAVERS.

After their narrow escape, they wander along looking for another inane plot device to hustle things along and fill time, and for once it isn't another ninja, which is good because the screenwriter didn't really bother naming the two that already showed up.

No, what we need is some convenient cop-out to explain what the fuck is going on. So next up is the cook, who, lucky for us, is ready and prepared to be all the exposition we'll need from here on out. He has audio samples, a series of helpful visuals, and all the information that he couldn't possibly know! He's like the Wikipedia of bullshit plot explanation!

"This is what you got on your third birthday, your mother's name was Mona."

He basically explains the entire back story of the movie and what happened to the ship. Long story short, some douche on the bridge got a case of Space Madness and killed the other crew members while everyone was asleep, leaving no one alive to tell the tale, especially not a cook.

Eventually he runs out of things to say and then decides to eat the protagonists, so he gasses them and ties them up. Oho, the cook eats people! Irony, thy name is Pandorum.

Don't worry, they convince the cook to let them go because they're the main characters, and it would mess things up if he ate them. So they went along their merry way to the reactor. Unfortunately, we find that the reactor can only be reached by narrow broken corrugated metal catwalks, extended over a moat filled with filthy mutants.

They were having a mutant mosh pit and got tired.

Yes, of COURSE the horrible freaks live in the reactor for no apparent reason. Where else would they live? Somewhere safe and close to their food supply? Don't be stupid. You're stupid.


Of course, this asshole shows up again to ruin everything. He must be exhausted from running all over the ship bothering everyone all the time. Come on, man. Get a hobby.

The ninja man kills the mutant and they save the reactor with three minutes to spare. I'm just putting it right out there, because that's the predictable part that I have any hope of explaining. I needed to get to the part where this happens, and I'm just going to let it speak for itself:

IT'S FULL OF STARS
AND YOU CAN SUCK ONE

Honestly, this part was good stuff, and I'm not going to ruin it. It's the only part that was kind of how I hoped the whole movie would go. One guy is another guy, and this guy was crazy, and this guy isn't even there, and what you thought was true actually wasn't, and you go "Oh snap."

And in a final twist: surprise, the ship wasn't drifting in deep space, it was at the bottom of the ocean on Tanis!

It must have really strong windows and hull to withstand a crash like that, to say nothing of speeding interstellar debris that would batter it throughout the decade-long journey.

Hey whoops.

Oh, no, wait, a low velocity impact from a little chunk of metal off of the console blew out the glass like it was a car windshield. Yes, good, excellent writing. You fucking idiots.

The ship is filling with water! Quick, the escape pods, they're airtight for a quick escape into space, should the hull ever be breached! (Which, in deep space with no other ships to rescue you, is just a slow agonizing death drifting in the void, but whatever.) And don't forget to bring the love interest, you need to start popping out little botanist technician ninjas.


Haha, sorry asshole! They're airtight, BUT THEY AREN'T WATER TIGHT!


The water must be pouring in through all the plot holes!


It's a close call, but all the pods came to the surface filled with everyone who didn't turn into a mutant or a ninja or get eaten, and now mankind can survive and ruin this fucking planet too, which is good I guess.

Nancy Drew: Legend of the Crystal Skull

I received Nancy Drew: Legend of the Crystal Skull as a Christmas gift from a friend whom I now assume doesn't like me very much.

It sat on my desk for weeks afterward, and over time I began to think that it may have some redeemable content. After all, the puzzle adventure game genre is a pretty simple formula to follow. A basic story and some scattered puzzle bits and you're essentially good to go, and as this was evidently the 17th in the series, they'd had time to refine the process.

This is a kids game, but it's rated "10 and up". I'm well aware I'm not the target audience, here, but I'm upwards of ten, so no problems there. And it had a skull on it and some kind of pirate guy on the back, so how bad could it really be.

So at last I bit the bullet popped in the disc and loaded up the game. It was time to put on my detective hat and my Nancy Drew cardigan and solve some kind of half-assed teenage mystery!

Nancy's desk popped up on my monitor in what turned out to be a fairly accurate representation of what was to come, and I realized immediately that I had made a serious mistake.

All the best detectives live on suburban cul-de-sacs.

On the desk top, in ascending order by the magnitude of concern I felt at their presence, were the following:

1. Desk lamp

2. Case file on the current mystery

3. Plane ticket

4. Small Mayan statuette

5. Scrapbook of mementos from previous cases

6. Statuette of a mother and baby blue whale

7. Book titled “How to be a Detective”

8. A fucking unicorn.

I decided I really needed to get a beer, and - while I was preparing for the worst - my bottle of Crystal Skull Vodka autographed by Dan Aykroyd. With that on my desk I felt I could cancel out that unicorn while still staying on message.

The book gave a basic overview of controls, and my first sample of Nancy's chipper Pleasantville voice-over. I glanced through the case file and clicked the plane ticket, which the book informed me would start me on my adventure.

Here the game gave me my first surprise by offering me two modes of difficulty, in the form of Junior or Senior detective.

When I flash one of these, people gonna respect.

As shiny as the Junior Detective badge was, I really felt that this is where the "and up" part of "10 and up" comes in and decided to step up and be a man.

And don't forget your teddy bear.

A man playing a game designed for little girls.

(I turned out the lights.)

The game begins at the door to a mansion, which belongs to the grandfather of a friend of a friend of yours, who is now dead, and somehow this adds up to permission for Special Agent Tween to come poking around.

Entering like she owns the place, Nancy stumbles across a man in a skeleton costume.

Kra-kow, lightning! The power goes out, and when it comes back on, Skeleton Guy has Batmanned across the room and is standing right in front of me!

...here.

It's a good thing the lights were out, or I wouldn't have gotten the full effect.

Suddenly, the skeleton man throws some dust in Nancy's face, she passes out, and wakes in another room. There an old lady I've never seen before tries to make Nancy drink a cup of green slime. The game is afoot!

From there the game delves below the shallow surface of the plot, and into the shallow core. Murder suspects include the emo computer kid, the old lady gardener who practices voodoo, an old man next to a gumbo truck, and the underdog suspect: a heart attack.

The police are pretty keen on the heart attack theory, but Nancy isn't convinced, or she wouldn't be here. For my money, I think it was the emo kid.

I'm on to you, emo kid.

Turned loose to explore on my own, and with no real leads or any idea what I was looking for, I started digging through everyone's stuff and asking a lot of personal questions that were really none of my business.

Within minutes, I was finding things that made me regret being such a busybody.

What. What the hell is this.

Oh, wait, I see. Never mind. It's just an eyeball in a trophy cup. Because really, who doesn't have one of those.

Weird eyes start turning up all over, and are - I swear - a pivotal part of the plot, unlike this creepy doll in the rocking chair that I found a little bit later.

They don't even pretend to have a reason for this shit.

As far as gameplay goes, every conversation is fully voiced, and each is as long and rambling as it is useless.

If you wiretapped a high school girl whose only hobby was cold calling special needs children and patients at mental hospitals to poll for arbitrary bullshit, you would get the audio content of Nancy Drew: Legend of the Crystal Skull.

To help you make the most of this feature, the game includes the invaluable “cell phone” tool, which enables you to solicit information or assistance from a number of helpful contacts. From the top to the bottom of your speed dial, these include:

1. Bess

   1. This is Nancy's friend, and she's even dumber than Nancy is. You get the chance to play as Bess frequently when Nancy calls and asks her out to do menial, illegal, and often dangerous tasks throughout the game. Between these ill-advised missions she allegedly goes shopping out on the town and fixes her hair, despite the fact that the entire game takes place during one interminable night in the middle of a tropical storm and no matter when Nancy calls her she's standing on the balcony of their hotel room. My own theory is that Bess stays in the hotel and cries, making up lies to tell Nancy so her life sounds more interesting.

2. Dan

   1. Nancy's boyfriend. Calling him doesn't advance the story in any significant way, but that doesn't stop Nancy and Dan from chatting on and on about how confused she is about this whole crazy murder business. Clues are hard!

3. The Cab Company

   1. Another number with no impact on the story. When you call it, you get a message saying the storm is too out of control for taxis to drive in, so you can't leave. More than anything this felt like the developer's way of laughing at me for buying their awful game. Well played.

4. A crazy old woman

   1. Someone who Nancy met on a previous adventure, and though it was hard to pay attention through their frustratingly stupid and disjointed talks, I came away secure in the knowledge that I should stay away from all of Nancy's previous adventures.

5. An old man's answering service

   1. This is the old man next to the gumbo truck that Bess has to talk to. When you call, it reminds you that he is unavailable, in case you'd suffered a recent head trauma and needed the constant reminder about his whereabouts on your speed-dial.

There's no way to skip or fast forward through these long forays into the realm of Nancy's night and weekend minutes, and I spent a lot of time hammering on the space bar because even if it wasn't serving any function, it was drowning the voice-overs out a bit, and was less aggravating to listen to.

In the end, that's just obnoxious. It doesn't ruin the actual gameplay, just my life.

What's worse - and most damning for a puzzle adventure game - you simply cannot examine any items in your inventory that are not books or notes. This means that any details or clues on these items are impossible to see, and in fact the inventory icons are so small the items are difficult to tell apart at all.

It's difficult to explain how incredibly frustrating it is to be unable to convince Nancy to look at what she's holding in her hands at any point in time.

Luckily, this frustration can be eased by dressing lizard up in different costumes. Optometrist; pirate; police officer; and, of course, clown. What in any other game would be a stupid mini-game time killer is, in this one, an essential part of the plot. Don't want to dress an iguana like a pirate? Too bad, asshole, there's a murder to solve!

Honk honk.

This made me ashamed of myself as a person, a little bit.

The game did score some points with me for one clue, however:

Oh, a box.

Hahaha, fuck you! Happy nightmares, kids!

There's also a Rube Goldberg contraption, which, thanks to the lizard, is only the second most improbable asset to a murder investigation in this game - despite the fact that it takes hours to construct in full view of the person you're trying to trap with it, who then happily triggers it and is critically disabled by... wait for it...

...sneezing powder.

I know.

You could probably have just handed him a rock and asked him to club himself with it, though it makes sense to me that the only way someone as dumb as Nancy can be a detective is for everyone else in the world to be functionally retarded.

Fortunately, in a world of the stupid failure has no consequence. There are several places in the game where your adventure can meet an early end. Bitten by a spider, stung by wasps, or eaten by a crocodile were a few that I encountered.

After each, the game gives a helpful recommendation like “Hey, maybe try not to get bitten by spiders this time” or “That crocodile just ate you. Why did you let it eat you, what were you thinking.”, and resets you to the moment just before your critical error so that you can make wiser decisions.

Of course! Why didn't I think of that?

One may think that during a murder investigation, your primary threat is going to be the murderer themselves attempting to get you out of the way, as you are after all not a law enforcement official but a dangerously nosy teenage girl who no one seems to like or pay attention to.

This was a rookie mistake, and this game taught me that when investigating a homicide, you really need to look out for angry fauna.

Bonus lesson: don't eat too much chocolate, it will make you throw up. (Not great for Nancy, but it pleased me to cause her pain in little ways to retaliate for her incompetence. I spent a lot of time hanging around the wasp nest.)

Hey, come on Nancy. This is a kid's game.

By the time I had trudged my way through most of the game it had become very clear that Nancy had never actually cracked open that “How to be a Detective” book.

As bad as the game's narrative packaging and mechanics were, the puzzles were actually challenging from time to time. Legend of the Crystal Skull isn't the next Myst by a long shot, but several of the puzzles on Senior Detective mode took me a while to figure out.

The rest of them were either as lame as the dialogue, or just borderline disturbing.

Those eyes I mentioned earlier? Near the end, when you collect all twenty-five, you plug them into a special case in the wall to solve the climactic puzzle.

I hear detectives run into this kind of thing all the time.

I think the real answer to this puzzle is: "I've spent my adult life designing Nancy Drew computer games, and now I've finally lost my mind."

It's a downhill race to the anticlimax from there.

I don't want to ruin the end for you, so it's really lucky that nothing can ruin this ending more than the ending itself already does.

As the guilty party launches her cunning escape plan and attempts to float slowly away from the shore - and Nancy- in a shitty old speedboat, a crocodile ruins her pointless monologuing by bumping her boat. This startles her into dropping the large carved crystal skull, and the heroic reptile eats it.

This may seem like a strange twist until you see that the crocodile, understandably, mistook the skull for a marshmallow. His favorite food, if you recall from a conversational detail from early on in the game. For your sake, I sincerely hope you don't.

At this point the murderer apparently calls it a day and turns her boat around, then waits until the police show up and cart her off to jail. She only ever got about two feet away from shore anyway.

That's my guess, anyway, the developers didn't seem to feel that the apprehension of the murderer needed to be addressed very specifically.

For succeeding in solving the gripping deep south mystery you are rewarded with a photo montage, accompanied by a lengthy voice-over by Nancy. Hooray!

You can't skip through this, either.

Wait, I won. Why am I being punished?

As is mandatory for a game of this sort, it's revealed through the montage that everyone has learned valuable lessons and had their happy ending.

Except for emo kid.

Life is hard.

At the end of the game, I was crushed to find that I had fallen short in my detecting. There are a number of achievements you can earn over the course of the game, and I had only netted half of them. I was astounded to learn that though I had suffered through hours of soul crushing bullshit, I hadn't won the Chit Chat Award.

Touché, Nancy.

As a final parting message, Nancy informs me that she's ready for her next big adventure, and that I should come along to help her solve another fantastic mystery!

Not a chance in hell.

In all, despite the frustrations, I'm going to have to give the game a D+.

That spider thing went a long way with me, and a couple of the puzzles were actually fun.

And, you know, maybe the vodka helped.