Pandorum review: In space no one can hear you scream “ripoff!”

So this is what has been keeping Cung Le from defending his Strikeforce middleweight title: Pandorum, a grimy glowstick-illuminated sci-fi monster movie that owes much – well, pretty much everything – to the Alien films as well as bits of Pitch Black and Resident Evil. Yet for all its genre-splicing derivativeness, it still manages to be a more-than-above-average thrillride.

Pandorum is set aboard an intergalactic Noah’s Ark, where crewmen Ben Foster (3:10 To Yuma) and Dennis Quaid (Any Given Sunday) awake from years of hyper-sleep to find their memories and fellow crewmembers missing. From there it’s a struggle to figure out who they are and what happened to everyone else while also trying to fix their malfunctioning spaceship. Toss in the aforementioned monsters in the dark, a serious case of deep-space psychosis and enough muck and grime to make you feel like you need a shower, and the result is, well, exactly that, a space movie that flirts with Lovecraftian existentialism and the occasional disemboweling.

The film is heavy on atmosphere, and it’s a pretty heavy atmosphere at that – paranoid, claustrophobic and just plain icky. Fortunately, you can tell that the man at the helm, director Christian Alvart, loves the space monster genre and does his best to hold our attention, even when it slips into the occasional blackhole of bleakness and boredom. Sure there are plot holes big enough to swallow a supernova – how many times can Foster fall down a shaft, tunnel or tube without collapsing a lung? And how many glowsticks did he stuff into that tight little flight suit of his? But those are minor quibbles. I mean, what movie about a spaceship infested with cannibalistic creatures hasn’t had a few tumbles in logic? It’s the nature of the beast and in Alvert’s hands, and aided by solid performances all around, Pandorum pretty much pays off.

Now, if you’re seeing this for Cung Le, you might be disappointed. He has an important but minor role and his ass-kicking is kept to a minimum and is unfortunately shot in that Bourne-inspired shaky-cam style that prevents any appreciation of his martial arts ability. Still, he’s a charismatic presence even when he’s speaking only in Vietnamese. That he only speaks in Vietnamese and his dialogue has no subtitles makes it difficult to know how good his line delivery is, but he seems convincing given the restraints and limitations of his role.

Is he good enough to warrant abandoning MMA for acting? That’s hard to say. On a scale of one to ten, with one being Steven Seagal in Fire Down Below and ten being Jean-Claude Van Damme in JCVD (and yes, JCVD really is that good), Le comes in around a Chuck Norris-circa-Code of Silence level six.