What do you get if you mix a boring hung over Sunday afternoon trip to the cinema with generous helpings of Alien, Sunshine, The Descent and Event Horizon? Pandorum, possibly the most unoriginal sci-fi film ever. If you’ve seen director Christian Alvart’s previous film the barefaced blatant Seven rip off Antibodies this won’t be much of a surprise.

By the time you realise you’ve been mugged off by the trailer you won’t care. Pandorum rattles along so fast you‘ll be enjoying yourself whilst subconsciously your brain notes every massive gap in plot logic for later discussion in the pub. What little plot there is concerns some pointless rubbish about two astronauts who awake from “an extended hypersleep” on a giant spaceship with little recollection of who they are or what their mission is. This vaguely original opening gambit is enough to sustain the film through its first act by which time there’s so much other stuff happening you’ll have eaten almost all your popcorn without realising.

Back to that plot logic or lack thereof, the majority of stuff - plot points if you will, happen simply to push events along towards the conclusion, but you won’t realise or care until you’re in the pub such is the tension and pace. Slightly more annoying, the main twist is fairly obvious from early on but unoriginal as Pandorum is and as jaded as I am I still guessed the secondary twist wrong.

Alvart injects proceedings with creepy, menacing tension and throws in a fair few jumpy moments. Production and creature design are superb, visual effects are flawless, and the look is stylish as you would expect for film shot in Germany, very cold and hard and efficient, (alright I made a Germany is efficient joke but I won’t mention the war) which suits the mood perfectly. It is a little bit too dark in places, editing is a little choppy though thankfully the obligatory shaky cam is just about not overused.

Ben Foster is excellent as the lead and looks to be having fun, Dennis Quaid does not, he looks weary, like he can’t be bothered. My girlfriend suggested it may have been due to his character, I thought it was because he was pissed off having all the (unnecessary) plot exposition. How times have changed since Quaid’s last visit to Germany to make a film (the “classic” Enemy Mine). Mind you that was so long ago he wasn’t old enough to be grumpy and I wasn’t old enough to see it.

Despite the big budget, Pandorum is pure straight to video/TV movie fodder, intentionally or otherwise. It’s like the sort of films you used to get about fifteen/twenty years ago, before Michael Bay and UCI destroyed cinema (look, I got a Michael Bay is shit reference in). Dare I say B-movie, it reminded me of awesome films like Split Second and Leviathan, films critics hated that were derivative thinly veiled rip offs. Films people really enjoyed, made by film makers probably at Cinecittà (Google it) and not by business men in Hollywood. Ironically, that probably wasn’t the case with Pandorum as one of the fifty million executive producers was Paul W.S. Anderson. But wait a minute, maybe I'm doing him a disservice as I happen to like most of his derivative B movies, especially Event Horizon and Pandorum is actually hugely enjoyable.