Pandorum: (2009. dir: Christian Alvart) It's a darkly-lit, quickly-paced, sci-fi psychological thriller, and monsters come included in the package. Probably it belongs loosely in a category with Alien and Pitch Black, but also with a foot set firmly in Moon territory. If it fails ultimately to satisfy, the fault lies with its method of communicating the onset of madness: filming with quick cuts and from strange angles a man moving fast and erratically, giving a beetle-like effect, coupled with the usual "I'm mad! I'm mad!" grins and grimaces. Unfortunately, enough of it is included in the climactic scenes that it's hard to hold the tension; it crosses into unintentional humor.
Outside of that, I can't find much to fault it, as long as you're willing to exercise your suspension-of-disbelief muscles some, but it's hard to get excited about it, either. The monsters are a sort of nefarious cross between orcs and Firefly reivers, and waking disoriented from suspended animation on a long space voyage is a brilliant device for setting up ongoing horror and doubt. Ben Foster is the lead, and there's something inherently creepy about him, which plays well when we're trying to figure out the good guys from the bad, but in the end it's hard to fully buy his nice-guy act.
I just watched this movie about half a year ago, and I honestly didn't remember Reedus was in it, so I watched it again. There he is, in one great scene, a member of the flight crew on this vast, crippled, chaos-riddled ship, living in the throes of ongoing terror and privation, when our newly-roused hero runs across him. He gives us a full five minutes of nothing but varying degrees of panic, dread, and psychic anguish. When I watch him in something like this, or Red Canyon, in which he's so fully assured in his task, it makes me think that his failures come when directors fail simply to give him enough to do. When he has a pointed task to accomplish, or a heightened enough emotional state to explore, he never sets a foot wrong. It's in the meandering movies in which he stumbles, when the stakes aren't high enough, the emotional demands diffused. Maybe the director's hand is too weak to guide him. Or maybe he just gets bored.
Rating: two and a half stars
Reedus Factor: two and a half stars
I'm Losing You: (1998. dir: Bruce Wagner) Unapologetic melodrama, leavened some by Jewish mysticism, set amongst the Hollywood elite and its offspring. (Wagner is the guy who wrote the screenplay for Cronenberg's new and controversial, anti-Hollywood acid-scather, Maps to the Stars.)
The best part is that there's some interesting talk about menstruation, a subject infrequently addressed on the silver screen. Reedus is going down on the Rosanna Arquette character until interrupted by, well, menstruation. She says to him, "Older men like the blood," to which he retorts, horrified, "Well, then, go fuck an old guy." As he's leaving, she laughs and says, "Don't go away mad. Just go away." Those two lines of hers, taken together, are some of the most startling and unexpectedly delightful I've heard from an onscreen woman's mouth in some time. Reedus' unnamed boytoy character (she avoids introducing him properly to her brother and niece as he's leaving, and after he's gone, refers to him as the plumber) really only exists to more sharply delineate her, and then he vanishes, nameless, no doubt to find a less complicated woman, leaving her to her philosophical musings and the crowd of whispering voices in her head.
This movie is a kind of a familial soap-opera fortress from which one stands protected whilst staring at death: the main characters are a grown brother (Andrew McCarthy) and adoptive sister (Arquette) whose father (Frank Langella), the wealthy producer of a Trek-ish type sci-fi TV franchise, is dying. Death, in fact, is omnipresent. The dead and dying and death-obsessed pile up in heaps before the end. This film-maker wants you to think about it, the shuffling off of the mortal coil, but his attitude can pretty much be summed up in the fact that the AIDS-stricken Elizabeth Perkins character is in the story as long as she's still beautiful and well-coiffed, but tastefully leaves the screen before crumbling into the unsightly grotesquery of her death-throes. In short, this guy wants you to think about death, poetically and philosophically, but he doesn't trust you to deal with its physical realities.
Rating: one and a half stars
Reedus Factor: one and a half stars
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