Pandorum

Christian Alvart’s film came out of two scripts welded together. In the late 1990s Travis Milloy wrote one about a prison ship called Pandorum whose inmates degenerate into cannibals. When Paul W. S. Anderson and Jeremy Bolt brought it to Alvart, he already had his own screenplay, No Where, about astronauts who wake with no memory; the two were reduced to one script. In the merge Pandorum stopped being a ship and became a disorder brought on by long deep space travel: paranoia, delirium, nosebleeds. That rename is the governing decision. Whenever something fails to add up, a character may simply be ill, so you doubt what you see rather than solve it. The story splits in two, one strand crawling the corridors while the other stays in the reactor room, and by the end one of them has to be read again. Shooting took place at Babelsberg in Potsdam in 2008, with 6 million dollars of the budget from the German Federal Film Fund. It cost 33 million in all and took 20.6 million worldwide; Milloy has said a sequel and prequel were intended. A good fit if you like an explanation you cannot separate from the sanity of whoever gives it. Not for anyone who wants a clear look at the creatures; the corridors stay dark on purpose.