We start off with some giant scrolling screens in space, a la Star Wars. They inform us, by way of timelines, that the Earth built a satellite in order to find a new planet to inhabit due to immense overpopulation. The year is something like 2173, the planet's population is over 20 billion and everyone is fighting over food and water. Shit is getting out of hand and a solution needs to be found... fast.
**Since you probably won't watch this movie (Even though I enjoyed it and think everyone should, if not for the ridiculousness then to see Quaid go ape-shit), what follows is the complete plot to the film and my thought. This is one big spoiler alert**
Enter the giant space ship, Elysium. After a good shot of the outside, we cut to a scene of a dude, covered in tubes (reminds me of that one scene in The Matrix) inside of a strange chamber, freaking the fuck out. We go outside the chamber and see that it is labeled "Bower".
The guy, Bower (Ben Foster), busts out of the tube and tries to put together the pieces of just what the hell is going on. He starts peeling off what looks like his skin, but apparently... old skin? It's kind of like a snake shedding it's outer layer, which leads me to believe that he's be asleep in that chamber for a long time- so long that his dead skin cells just piled the fuck up and now he's got to go all snake-style on it.
He manages to find his locker and get dressed, only to discover that he has memory loss from extended hyper-sleep. Bingo! Next to wake up is Payton (Quaid), the lieutenant in this shit show- he too remembers nothing before being woken up. They get all cleaned up and head to the flight deck to try and contact the other crew members, but no one is around- a third chamber with "Cooper" on it is empty.
After, I don't know, five minutes of waiting around, Payton decides to send Bower up into the air ducts to try and find a way to the rest of the ship- the power keeps fluctuating and the doors refuse to open. So Bower's in the vent, complaining like an asshole, and he ends up making a wrong turn and falling down a shaft (that's what she said?). He ends up finding the dead body of Cooper, which is a complete corpse at this point. It's right around here where Payton thinks they've been asleep for 8 years, meaning Cooper could have been dead for a long time.
Suddenly, the two lose contact with each other. Bower ends up running into a girl, who attacks him and steals all of his shit. She bails and he's surrounded by a strange noise which is apparently generated by alien creatures... YEP! Holy SHIT! Did you fucking see that guy!? Haha he's like a deformed-midget-mutant-alien mix.
We then see, by way of flashbacks, that Bower and Payton are "pioneers" being sent to a new planet that has the capability to support life. Bower starts freaking out (what is it with this guy?) that his wife is on board (not confirmed yet) and he has to go save her and the rest of the passengers. Personally, I'm thinking the mutants got her, but we'll have to wait and see.
Next we see a pretty cool flashback of a different ship, one where a crew member experienced "pandorum". He went nuts due to a reaction from the hyper-sleep and got all paranoid, thinking that his ship was cursed. So he did the only logical thing a crazy person would do: launched all of the people that were in hyper-sleep (5,000 of them) off the ship and into space, where they floated away forever. What a prick.
Bower stumbles across another survivor, but he is quickly killed by the mutant creatures. The freaks begin to chase B-sauce, but at the last second he is saved by a spear-wielding Asian guy named Manh (Cung Le). The pair escape, only to run into that crazy bitch from earlier, who turns out to be a good guy. The girl, Nadia (Antje Traue), informs Bower that the ship was like Noah's Ark, carrying all plants and animal types and a ton of individuals who were to populate/inhabit the new planet.
Meanwhile, Dennis Quaid is FREAKING OUT. I don't want to call it this early, but I think we have another case of pandorum on our hands. He ends up finding a guy, Gallo (Cam Gigandet) up in the rafters... but I don't know, I think it's a hallucination and Quaid is just a lunatic.
We next see a few pretty cool fight scenes and soon discover that it's pretty God damn difficult to kill the freaks. The three survivors beat, stabbed and punched the shit out of this thing and still only barely killed it. The trio run into another guy who explains to them that the Earth was destroyed and the people on the ship, all current parties included, are the last humans in existence (we also see flashes over to Quaid and his friend, who is telling him the same thing).
It also turns out that one of the captains of the ship (GALLO!) went fucking nuts and just started killing everyone (there was some rape involved as well apparently), and awakened the crew, banishing most to the hold of the ship where they were forced to eat each other in order to survive. Every passenger was given some sort of shot while in hyper-sleep, making it easier for them to adapt to then new planet once they got there. Instead, the shot made the crew adapt to the ship and, well, become cannibal mutants who fed off of other sleeping passengers.
After this weird story and a few close encounters with the mutants, Bower makes his way to the reactor and re-starts it, thus saving the ship from imminent doom/total power failure. Bower starts making his way back to the bridge to see Payton, but he finally regains his memories and realizes that Payton is really Gallo. Payton too realizes this and we see that Gallo was just a hallucination brought on by the pandorum- so Quiad is the real killer here! Called it...
Bower and Quaid start fighting, with each trying to convince the other that they are suffering from pandorum (in actuality, they both are). Nadia, meanwhile, is able to open the emergency shutters on the windows in the bridge, revealing blackness. Suddenly a bunch of fish swim by and they realize that the ship has crash landed on the planet and they are in the water. A readout display on one of the computers reveals that they have been in hyper-sleep for 923 years!
Bower does the logical thing here and smashes the window, flooding the ship. He and Nadia make it to an escape pod and jettison out of the ship, along with the rest of the surviving individuals in their pods- the ship does this automatically upon the breaking of the window.
Everyone makes it to the surface and we see a gigantic ship in the water and a beach not too far away. There are a little over 1,000 survivors to start the new world. Thank God, it's over.
For the record, I polished off a decent amount of beer for the viewing of this movie, and it was truly needed.
This flick certainly reminded me of Alien, in terms of the vastness of the ship and utter lack of people on board- don't get me wrong here, this is where the comparison ends. There is a lot of shadow use and the film is pretty dark (literally, there isn't much light)- this adds to the creepy effect.
There were some more positive aspects of the film, some being: the sets were pretty cool, truly making the viewer believe that they are on a giant spaceship, devoid of life except for the main characters and the mutants. The mutants looked pretty cool and the gore was top notch- real bloody and gross. The fight scenes were alright, fast but a bit forced and scripted. The character development was cool and I liked the twist of Quaid really being Gallo.
Overall, it was pretty bad but I don't regret watching it. I feel the more interesting story here would be what happens once the survivors make it to land and start rebuilding their civilization.
3 out of 5
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