This movie is exhaustively bad.

The tagline for this should have been “Pandorum: Definitely not a sequel to Event Horizon!” in big happy words. This is yet another attempt at the doomed-to-failure space-slasher genre, something you may have seen in other high-budget-yet-crappy movies like “Sunshine.”

Whoever wrote the script for this was clearly a big fan of Event Horizon (which was actually a really good movie). And, I'm gonna be honest, the script for this... wasn't terrible. It wasn't good, but it wasn't terrible. It seemed to have an adequate premise from what I could gather and a few instances of strong dialogue (like the one guy telling his story about little indians, that was nice even if I don't know what he was talking about).

It was visually good. The designs of things like costumes, weapons, and monsters (gasp, spoilers) were all really pretty well-done.

The acting was good (except in the case of Dennis Quaid). Ben Foster and Antje Traue gave particular strong performances, even if... well, let's say Antje practiced her English a lot between Pandorum and Man of Steel. Her voice is melodic and expressive but the words she forms really mean nothing about 80% of the time. The movie is also wise enough to have her deliver the majority of exposition (in other words, you never get to know what's going on).

What this movie really is, is a directorial disaster. It's gloomy and grimy, too dark to see. The scenes are choppy and the storyline is incredibly challenging to follow. About halfway through I more or less gave up on trying to figure out what was going on, and just figured, “Oh well, space monsters.”

Even that, however, proved to be boring. Focusing closely, I felt like the action scenes were actually decent. But something about the pacing and the music just made me not care, like my eyes drifted away from the screen to look at more interesting things, like my desk, or that guy over there's unsettling mustache.

I can't go into too much detail, both for fear of spoilers and because I didn't understand the majority of the plot, nor care. That's fortunate, however, since this film doesn't really deserve to be gone into in detail. If you decide to watch it because the plot sounded interesting, just rewatch Event Horizon. If you're watching it for Antje Traue, just rewatch Man of Steel. If you're in it for Ben Foster, just rewatch 3:10 to Yuma. And if you're in it for Dennis Quaid... get out.