They never made it to Tanis

Who would win in a fight? Dennis Quaid from Pandorum. So his character from Pandorum, who is like a captain who woke up out of hypersleep. Or Chris Pratt from Passengers, who is a psychotic man who murdered Aurora and murdered Lawrence Fishburne. This is a surprisingly close match because I would venture to say that the two characters that you just named are, in fact, the same character. Yes. Oddly enough. I have a small theory write-up I did for that that I'd like to present when you're doing yours. I was thinking the same thing. I was thinking Pandorum is basically a sequel to Passengers, the movie that came way later. Hello and welcome to The Popcorn Isn't Real, the podcast where we cover fan theories about all sorts of media, books, TV shows, movies, video games. We take deep dives into any sort of fan theory, any sort of alternate interpretation of your favorite stories. We do amazing research. We don't just like read comments off of Reddit.

We try to figure out what really happened or what might have happened. The person you just heard talking was one of our hosts, Storwald, and I'm the other host, Leif Eric. Some people can tell our voices apart, but most can't. Most people can't. I can. In this episode, we're going to be covering the 2009 sci-fi horror known as Pandorum. One of my favorites, directed by Christian Albert, who we'll be hearing from today. He has graciously agreed to be on the podcast and share some of the facts and tidbits behind the making of the movie. We were able to interview him and you'll be hearing pieces of that interview throughout this episode. The legend goes that Travis Malloy came up with the original screenplay. And that screenplay was then specifically brought to Christian Albert to direct because he was known to be working on a very similar film already. Apparently it was titled Nowhere, and it was so similar to Pandorum that he was like, whoa, oh, did this guy like read my screenplay?

What's going on? And then he was able to merge the two screenplays together, his own screenplay and the other one to make Pandorum. And I would love to hear Christian Albert's thoughts on this. I would love to hear the backstory on this. Yeah, that's true. It actually sounds more complicated than it is. Like we smashed two screenplays together, but it was actually, for me, it was way scarier than that. I was meeting the producers of Pandorum on another project. We were talking about some of the Resident Evil parts and all that, and they really liked my movie Antibodies. And we didn't come together on anything, but then they sent me the script Pandorum, and I had actually worked on my Nowhere project. And I really had like the opening act and the final act for me was super clear what it needs to be. And it's very much like what ended up in Pandorum, specifically the waking up, almost like

in a dream state, mind of mine, I had this, how must it be? It must be so confusing and so weird waking up and not knowing what's going on. And what if it's longer and your memory is hazy and all that? I just had this strong imagination and they sent me the script and the first act and the last act were very, very, very similar to my script to the point where I was like, I'm fucked now because basically if i don't do their movie you know my movie i can't make it because there's a record of me you know having access to their material and if i do it now they'll sue me that was before i even made case 39 so i've made one real movie and one amateur movie so i was super young and i was like oh my god these big hollywood producers sent me the script so now my project is that but maybe maybe because i didn't like some of the things uh they're all fine but i didn't like them for me and i didn't want to lose some of the aspects of my script i went to

them and to the writer and basically pitched um my script and what you could do to their script to mesh them together and and i mean the main difference is that the the travis wrote a really cool i think and i mean that honorably uh b-movie thriller where it's on a prison ship and there's like a mutiny, and one of the guards wakes up and doesn't know that Peyton is a prisoner. So it's very similar in terms of the structure. It's basically a prison riot in space. I always love generational spaceships, because if there's no hyperdrive or warping of space-time or anything, how you would basically have to send out arcs that have to keep traveling forever. My script, that was the part that there's like these capsules where three flight crew are in and they rotate like a revolver around and everybody has two years of service. And then the revolving door switches and the next one comes up. And I just love, what if you don't get relief?

It was for me, I think very clear vision of how you could mash them together without feeling mashed. Some of the critics say it's obvious and there should have been two movies, but I kind of disagree. I think we worked well together, Travis and I, and made a nice, somewhat elevated project, you know. What I always try to make is a movie that maybe not everybody loves, but for some people, it's the favorite movie. You know, it's not meh, it's not mid. Pandorum is still the movie, even though it bombed, that has the most people coming to me that are really passionate about the movie. Now, I really feel like Pandorum flew under a lot of people's radars. i hadn't even heard of it until it was already released 2008 to like 2012 ish like the what a great year for like random horror movies i know i mean sorry a great era for random horror movies yeah well that was several years that you just condensed into one year

man i just saying like that that time period there were tons of random horror movies that came out with like big budgets like Pandora on Elm Street remake which I know you loved hey you sounded like the new Freddy just then whoa I'll bet you looked like him too yeah my face is just like a melted monkey dude I know you would say it if I if I alluded to it it just seems like that kind of late 2000s early 2010s had a bunch of random whores that were actually kind of high in budget or as I think if they were made now, they'd go straight to streaming and they'd be much lower in budget. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I feel like some like AAA horror movies that came out just after this in that era, like, for example, Predators actually drew inspiration from Pandora in a lot of respects. It had kind of the same thing going on with the untrustworthy survivor, you know, luring them in and lulling them into a false sense of security and then betraying them.

That exact same thing happens in both movies. Thinking of Predators and Passengers, were you as baffled as me that that man who shows up was not Lawrence Fishburne? Yeah, absolutely. It's crazy how not Lawrence Fishburne he was. It is crazy. Lucky for me, I saw Pandora first, so I was more confused by Lawrence Fishburne when I saw Predators. I was like, haven't I seen this before? I don't think a horror, a sci-fi horror movie from that era is complete without Lawrence fishburn showing up and dying i also love that you seem to include passengers in that era when it's clearly not it came a decade later and also it's not a horror as much as it should have been it is not a well i think i thoroughly proved that it was go listen to our passengers episode no i love i love pandorum uh when i saw it a decade ago immediately it became one of my top sci-fi films of all time. So what is the story of Pandorum? This guy wakes up. His name is Boer,

Corporal Boer. And he wakes up in a pod, a cryogenic sleep pod. He comes out. He can barely remember what's going on. He's kind of disoriented. He meets another guy who wakes up from his pod, whose name is Dennis Quaid. His name is Peyton. Peyton is the name that he goes by. They were supposed to be the flight crew for this space expedition that takes 123 years. They're transporting 60,000 passengers to the planet called Tannis that they're going to populate because Earth is gross. And now it's time for their shift. And unfortunately, they wake up to find that Chris Pratt has run amok. They wake up to find that things are weird and other people aren't awake. And eventually they find out they're like mutants running amok. that have taken over the ship, and lots of people have been awoken, but there are also still people in their sleep pods. And also, like, the nuclear reactor drive is malfunctioning,

and they have to start it back up. Major spoilers. If you haven't seen the movie, go and watch it before we get into the rest of the plot, because there's some huge twists at the end. The important thing that we find out is that this ship actually made it to its destination and has been waiting 900 years or so under an alien ocean to let the passengers off. But one of the passengers, Officer Payton, went rogue and decided to conduct experiments on the ship, letting passengers out early and watching them fight for survival. This led to a new species evolving over the centuries, other officers not taking over, and the ship not functioning correctly. In the end, Bauer saves the day by forcing the ship to eject all of the remaining hypersleep pods. They float to the surface and the passengers can colonize and populate this alien planet. It's a happy ending. So you might notice that the title of the movie is Pandorum, but I never even mentioned Pandorum.

Well, we covered the plot of the movie. You might be asking yourself, what is Pandorum? Why is this the title of the movie? So they tell us early on in this movie that there is a psychological syndrome called Pandorum that people get in deep space when they've been in cryosleep. And the example they give of this sickness, Pandorum, is a person who came to believe that everything about the ship was cursed or evil. And then he was so paranoid that he ejected everyone into space and they all died. He ejected all the cryopods into space. So all the passengers were killed. And that became an infamous example of Pandorum. And it's really hard to spot Pandorum. Sometimes you might have a fever or a temperature. You might be itchy on your skin. But it's characterized by paranoia. Why is that the title of the movie? That didn't happen at all or have anything to do with the events of the movie. Or did it?

Well, the movie would have you believe that the reason it is important and they do mention it is because that's what set up the movie, right? Like that's the reason everything is happening. Pandorum is what happened before the movie started. But like you said, you can get through the whole movie without even knowing what Pandorum is, like I did, and like not even remembering what it meant or what it had to do with anything. Well, that was the thing that stuck out to me after I watched it the first time. I was like, Pandorum never came into play. they kept talking about it and alluding to it but it didn't have anything to do with the plot itself you might say that peyton slash gallo had pandorum he didn't do the signature thing of pandorum which is eject all the pods out of the ship he tried to eject himself a few times but he didn't do it um now i believe this is my theory i believe that the entire movie of pandorum

was actually from Bauer's point of view, that he was suffering the effects of Pandorum the entire time. I think he woke up as scheduled. I think he went completely nuts. I think he fought the crew, he fought the passengers, and his paranoid delusions kept him from seeing what was really happening. He came to believe that he was on a cursed ship of death and that he needed to get off and that he needed to get everyone off. And eventually, I think he did. He ejected all the passengers from the ship in the belief that he was saving them when, in fact, he was actually dooming them and also dooming humanity forever. I think that that is the secret of this movie, that Bauer had Pandorum and that he killed everybody in the end. The definition they give of Pandorum is essentially someone who ejects all the people into space. And that doesn't happen in this movie, except at the very end when he, quote unquote, saves everyone by ejecting all the people into the ocean and saves them.

And ever since I watched this movie the first time, like the instant the movie finished, I've been ever since then, I've been wanting to ask Christian Albert, the director, if, in fact, Bauer was supposed to have been experiencing Pandorum. And this was not a happy ending, but a tragic ending of the movie. I think, you know, the theories should be somewhat supported by the text, in this case, the movie. And I think it would be very bad filmmaking if something that is in the head of one character ends with superimposition of text saying that this is Tana's year zero. I think the text is not supporting the theory. I mean, there's many interesting theories and some of them are spot on. But again, the kind of uncertainty where this theory is derived from, that's on purpose. Because that's one of the challenges for these guys is like, okay, I cannot trust myself. What I like is today in this world where the internet, the truth comes harder to get by

and to basically not trust yourself and try to logically deduce what is bullshit and where you have biases and where you basically might have going down the wrong rabbit hole. I think that's interesting, even today, almost 15 years later, that you have to be able to check your own sanity from time to time. So Pandorum is also known as Orbital Dysfunctional Syndrome. How can I prove that he was suffering from Orbital Dysfunctional Syndrome? Well, I'm going to go through the movie and I'm going to present all the evidence that I could find in chronological order, as well as just my thoughts on the movie as usual. Great. Strap into your cryogenic sleeping pod. Oh, I'm strapped in. Make sure you don't eject yourself into the empty vastness of space. The very first thing we hear is a message being transmitted to the ship. You're all that's left of us. Good luck. God bless. We cut to a strange hallucination of a pale lady, all in white, in a white room, whispering,

I love you, but you can't hear what she's whispering. You can just read her lips. And then Corporal Bauer waking up from his cryosleep. I think all of that was his coma-induced dream. I think that the message from Earth was a reflection of his worries as he entered into cryosleep. I think that his dream about his ex-wife was also clearly a reflection of his worries. I think just the way that it's edited together, it makes sense that all of this is going on in his head. This movie is very much steeped in hard sci-fi. I love when he wakes up that you can see like the extra layers of dead skin sloughing off his body. How do you pronounce sloughing? I think it's sloughing with it. Sloughing. The extra layers of dead skin sloughing off his body. His long nails, his hair, his beard that has grown. I think there's just such amazing attention to the details in this movie. He shaves his beard with a laser razor.

I wish I had a laser razor. It's so cool. Dude, me too. I just wonder, like, if he put it too close to his skin, would it shave his face off? He has to very carefully put it extremely close, but not touch the skin. Yes. Like, it has to have, like, a focal distance, right? So if he moves it incorrectly, then it's just going to cut through him. Also, I have to note that apparently Christian Albert has a director's trademark where he shows a character shaving in three mirrors so that the character is visible four times in one shot shaving. I don't know. That's what IMDB says. It's pretty cool. It's half true. I had this shot in my first movie. As a little, I don't know, inside thing, I redid that shot a few times, but I stopped the minute it showed up on IMDb. It's not your trademark anymore. I don't know. I read it 10 years ago, 12 years ago. It's been on there forever. And I said, you know what?

If it's on here, I should not do it anymore.

Why do I believe that he's experiencing Pandorum from the get-go? Well, first of all, he is not just experiencing the amnesiac after effects of hypersleep. He is also shaking uncontrollably as he looks around the room and tries to get his bearings. Not only that, but you will note that there are instructions within his cryosleep capsule for what should happen, the procedure that should take place when you successfully wake up from cryosleep. And it includes the nutrition tubes disengaging automatically from you, and then the spinal umbilical disengaging, the door opening automatically, and you getting out of the pod. None of this happens to Bauer. The emergency procedure, which is described underneath that, happens to him. It says emergency procedure, if the door does not open, then you need to do this. and it says take off your respirator the the breathing thing which he does he actually follows

the emergency procedure step by step it's really good again the attention to detail in this movie is amazing and then it says to find the emergency disengage button on the right side of the pod and you can see he first he fumbles around with the umbilical on his back and then he immediately reaches over on the sides of the pod and fiddles around until suddenly it disengages and that says wait till the door opens and then manually remove the nutrition tubes from your arm. And I just thought this was really cool because that's how he gets out of his pod, doing the emergency procedure. But when Lieutenant Payton wakes up later, you can see that it actually, the entire procedure is different from when Bauer wakes up. The door opens and the extendable robotic spinal umbilical, it gently lowers him out of the chamber and then disconnects He has already had the nutrition tubes removed from his arms automatically, just like it was described in, you know, the standard procedure for exiting your cryopod.

So I just thought that was kind of cool that you can see something went wrong with Bauer's pod. Yeah, there's two different things at play here. First of all, Bauer, if he would have waited like 30 more seconds. He was just too fast. robot arm would have would have lowered it i i actually i haven't seen the movie in a while and i don't know if it's still in there i have to check it because it was in there for a long time and maybe still is he turns basically after he's dropped on the floor bauer he looks around in one of the early cuts and definitely in the script and then the arm comes out and tries to drop in a deleted which i thought was yeah that's a deleted moment you know and that's because he was just too freaking out too much. And then you have to remember that Peyton doesn't wake up for the first time. He's been doing this again and again. So he's kind of an old pro, you know, even if it's

subconsciously, but he's done this many times. I got you. That makes sense. But I also have to note that all of the props and sets in this movie just seem so sturdy and like real and like, you know, like hard. And also they spend the ending credits just like showing you, look at all the cool props and sets we made yeah and they're they're non-cg you know you can see what's there actually no and the cool thing is like this feels like an actual ship that was built to last for generations like nothing seems fake or aesthetic it's all industrial hard real like solid metal after he tries to disengage peyton's pod he then he just goes and grabs a pipe and starts beating on the front of his pod and the actor is just like swinging away like you can see that the the glass on the front of the pod gets like all scraped up and scuffed from him beating on it. And I'm like, wow, like they, they built some heavy duty stuff for this movie.

Like I said, I had this really strong haunting vision of, of this waking up scene. So I was particularly in love with that. So I made that set extra thought out. I mean, there were so many versions of it until I was really happy. And also there's the birth of Gallo, Young Gallo later on top of the weight camp. So this was all very thought out and very much built to last. But to be honest, whenever there was something that wasn't solid, I solidified it in post. Like I was, you know, if there's like a shake that shouldn't be there, then I just froze the image so that it wouldn't shake. It was super important. Just another indication that things didn't quite go right for Bauer. And another hint that we have as to maybe why he's experiencing such heavy after effects to his cryosleep. When he is getting dressed on the inside of his locker, there is a hypersleep disorientation recovery procedure.

And it looks like what you're supposed to do after you come out of hypersleep is do 15 yoga poses. Yeah. But I'll, very short point. We can only see 12 of them, unfortunately. I just want to point out that he does not do them. No. And he doesn't seem to recover from disorientation that quickly. Exactly. Perhaps ever. I think this has something to do with his heightened emotional state and his stress levels. I think it's cool that the solution to psychosis Pandorum is apparently just yoga. I mean, it makes sense, right? Like, again, I love how everything in this movie is like it has roots in real life. Like, OK, people woke up and are feeling stressed. How can we reduce the stress? Yoga. Yoga is great for stress reduction, right? Like, why not? I just think that's cool. And, you know, that's probably why he didn't get his memory back so fast. And it's probably what led to him experiencing such a hefty bout of Pandorum

throughout the rest of the movie. He should have done his yoga. I'm amazed that virtually everything in the ship can be powered by hand cranks. Yeah, wow, dude. Just 20 hand cranks can power like a whole console for like 20 minutes. Dude, yes. It's crazy. peyton's like well at least we can get this console working and then he opens up a hatch which reveals an emergency crank generator and bauer's like oh i didn't even think of that and he gets it up to 100 power with like just a couple cranks i mean this is like the most efficient crank ever like i've had like crankable flashlights and crankable radios you have to constantly crank them if you stop they don't work anymore but this one he just cranks a couple times and it's it's good to go. Not only is there no loss in energy, I think it somehow creates more energy than he expended. It's like everything is so high tech and yet everything works off a crank.

Either that or glow sticks. This ship loves glow sticks. As Bauer is getting ready for his trip through the tubes filled with more tubes, Um, he grabs a ton of glow sticks, uh, and he puts them in his pocket, but I love it because again, that's exactly what you would want in a gigantic enclosed vessel with no power. Uh, you know, if there is an emergency situation, logically you need something that can create light under its own influence because this ship is never going to get, you know, help from outside. Glow sticks and cranks. It's a fantastic backup. There's a lot of discussions behind the scenes. What is too smart and what is too dumb for the audience? And I was very adamant that it all has to make sense for us and we cannot cheat and all the technology has to work and all that stuff. And I almost dare people that think that it's dumb to discuss with me about all the plot holes because we were really, really going into the science of stuff.

Where's the power coming from? From your console. You know, after hundreds and thousands of years, how do you work it? So the whole design of the ship was not to look super sleek and super sci-fi, but to make it durable. You know, like this has to hold for thousands of years of traveling time. So everything is not to make you comfy or to look cool. It's to basically withstand radiation, withstand stress. You know, the ship is supposed to land on the planet, which is a major thing for something so big. I mean, it's just a lot of thought went into all the science, even including the gravity where it comes from and all that. I was going to ask about that because I've always felt like that's kind of a bit of a plot hole, how they all wake up on this ship and they have gravity. Shouldn't they wonder where that gravity is coming from? No, when you look at the model, there's rotating sections of the ship.

The thing is that, yes, there's gravity because, I mean, spoiler alert, but they're on the planet. So there is gravity, but the gravity is not always towards the floor. And that's why sometimes some stages are built with an angle or, you know, sideways because, you know, there's something wrong. And if they had not so much stress and more time to figure it out, they would actually deduce at some point they must be on a planet. But because they're being chased by monsters, there's no time. Yeah, during those scenes, they have a lot of other things on their mind than the gravity, a different gravity of the situation. Peyton, the supposed commanding officer, there are a lot of hints that he is not who he says he is. As he is, you know, kind of like rolling around on the ground and, you know, just kind of getting his bearings, eventually he gets up and kind of heads over to his locker. They flash Peyton's tattoo at the camera, and you can see that it says FLT04-012.

of course, Bauer's tattoo we saw earlier was FLT-005-015. Bauer explains later on that 005 stands for Flight Team 5. And he does this as he shows his tattoo to Peyton to verify, you know, not only we're on Flight Team 5, but also verify his own identity to Peyton. And I think this is just fantastic because after Bauer shows his tattoo to Peyton, we feel like we have verified both of their identities. We feel like, oh yeah, okay, these guys are on flight team five. We know that. But really, only Bauer has ever validated his own identity. Like I said, you see Peyton's tattoo and you can see that it has the wrong flight number. So literally anybody who is just paying extra attention might, you know, already from here be able to figure out that something's wrong and this guy is not with the right flight team. When Peyton is looking through his locker, He squints confusedly at the picture of his own wife, indicating that he's like, who in the heck is this?

Like, I don't know her. And then as he's getting dressed, he keeps fiddling and fiddling with his wedding ring, like trying to push it onto his finger. And it's not fitting right because it's not his wedding ring. They're just really, really good tiny details that this guy is absolutely not who he says he is. but he doesn't quite know it yet because he's also experiencing a little amnesia. And that is another cool thing that I like about it, that the main bad guy isn't the main bad guy for like the first half of it because he doesn't even know he's the main bad guy. He thinks he's Lieutenant Payton. He thinks he's the commanding office there. Just if you pay attention. And of course, this is a testament to Dennis Quaid's acting ability. I was going to say, so this is a weird random thing. You kept saying how much you love Pandorum. And for some reason, I kept wanting to say that's just because Dennis Quaid is in it.

And I was like, why do I want to say that? And then I remembered it's because I believe I was watching Enemy Mine with my mom at some point. Wow. I was going to watch that to prepare for this. And I didn't. Mom said something about, she kept saying how Dennis Quaid, like, she's like, oh, he just reminds me so much of Torvald. He's like, he seems so much like Torvald to me, like Torvald when he's older. Dude, that's so weird, because, like, when Dennis Quaid, like, gets the console running by cranking the generator, and Bauer is just, like, blown away by how smart Peyton is, Peyton looks back at him and just has, like, the most pretentious smile, like, yeah, I am that cool. And when he did that, I was like, oh, man, that's so something I would do. I was like, that is a Torvald smile. He's so full of himself. Oh, my God. i guess mom's right that's hilarious i can't believe you said that but no this is a testament to his acting ability because um you can see as he starts kind of like

trying to take control of the situation and giving orders to uh to bauer who is you know being a good soldier and faithfully waiting for orders uh you can see that peyton's struggling with everything he asked Bauer to do he like he's not quite sure and he's kind of trying things and he's like making it up as he goes along and he's like I should be able to do this but I don't feel like a commander for some reason because he's not he never was a commander all he did was kill his two crewmates and then do a bunch of crappy experiments and then go back to sleep so by your theory, does Peyton slash Gallo exist? No, and by my theory, this is all just Bauer's delusion, basically. Okay, so Bauer is also Peyton. Yeah, well, and this, I was going to say, there's evidence of, you know, like, characters kind of sharing the same mental space, because we find out that Peyton and Gallo are the same person. Two characters can definitely

be one character in this movie. So I kind of take it to be that basically Bauer is interacting with crewmates and at times is lucid and doing what they say, as in when he's interacting with Peyton. And then other times is going crazy and like, you know, defending himself and freaking out and thinking everybody is a monster. The ship is overrun with mutants. Well, I think his delusion is making itself up as it goes along. It's like a nightmare, right? It's like a bad dream where things kind of just don't make sense, but then they start to actually make sense as the bad dream keeps going because your mind kind of latches on to things and you learn something in your dream and then you make a connection and you're like, oh, that's what's happening, right? Like at first he's just like, what if there were aliens on this ship? What if there were monsters? And he starts seeing aliens everywhere.

And then he's like, oh, what if the monsters were like evolved humans, right? And the delusion just grows from there. bauer makes his way through the tube filled with tubes he starts to freak out basically he's getting claustrophobic the cool part is that he's having a panic attack and peyton over the over the radio calms him down with a legitimate anti-panic attack technique um where you joke when someone is having a panic attack you ground them by saying something that is humorously ridiculous peyton says this might not be the best time to tell you but i got the door open and then bauer's like are you kidding me and he's like yeah and then as they laugh bauer visibly calms down which is of course excellent acting but also excellent writing i thought that was really cool because that's a legitimate technique if you find someone having a panic attack tell them an absurd joke and it might help them to kind of ground themselves in reality

another technique that i know from experience is you can turn on quote-unquote calming asmr music it's so creepy because it's just like disembodied voices whispering to you you can't quite hear what they say the person having a panic attack just starts laughing because it's so stupidly creepy i love asmr music it's not music oh it's so good there's actually some really cool unnerving things that very subtly feed into the psychological idea that perhaps none of this is happening throughout this movie and that's the way the ship connects together it makes no sense to me that a ventilation tube full of tubes would lead into a shoe locker boot locker which it leads into a locker there should no there should not be ventilation there there's no need it's it's a storage space and the other time that i think is really cool is when after he meets man the the vietnamese guy he's walking down a hallway and then the hallway comes out

in a large storage container why would a hallway connect to a storage container that doesn't make any sense whatsoever like this ship is wacky crazy crazy town it's always don't just connect to shipping containers you're supposed to be able to lift those and move them around and stuff well right and this is actually a good a good time to go over this i was gonna mention that a lot of the cuts in this movie seem to be deliberately odd like what you just described There's some very strange camera angles and ending. It shows one situation, and then it cuts and shows the same situation, but everything's different, right? Like what you described, where he's in a hallway, cut, now it is a storage container. That exact same thing happens in this scene. He opens up the ventilation shaft and falls out, and then he says that he is in a boot storage. And then he suddenly falls sideways out of it, and it is just like a boot locker.

but then he doesn't call it a bootlocker he says oh actually it was a side hatch or a side panel or something he falls out with a bunch of boots he does so it was a bootlocker which is what he thought it was even though the boots weren't initially apparent to begin with yes but once they are apparent he changes his mind yes the whole scene is just weird and it just strikes me as like as many other scenes in this movie as if it's trying to throw you off like as if it was intentionally made weird the director of this movie christian albert i've heard that he storyboarded every like he personally like visually storyboarded every single scene in the movie and he had like 215 pages of storyboards no that's not enough no even more no no that's not enough it must be like more, I don't know, you know, was the storyboard book has like four shots on a page and probably 3000 images were drawn for that.

And that was in the, I mean, I'm, I'm a way more, um, uh, experienced now, so I, I don't need to storyboard everything anymore, but in the beginning I can only recommend if you, if you care about visual storytelling and position the camera, right. And there's no more stress on your movie than on set for time. You know, time is your great enemy. You have a specific amount of days and you have a specific amount of hours. So I'm not a big fan of figuring it out on the set. And that still exists. I had one storyboard artist who's been with me for a long time. He also did Case Study 9 and Antibodies and even some unrealized projects. if you uh check out a movie of mine called antibodies um there's a featurette where the first hour of the movie and then i ran out of time to do it i had to encode it myself but the first hour you can subtitle it with the story i've never seen that done anywhere but on the

dvd of antibodies if if you like their subtitle like english german and then storyboard and every shot has the corresponding storyboard where you see where we changed it and where we don't and i suggested that for pandorum as well but for some reason i don't think it ended up like i did the the work but i don't think it's on you did the work and they didn't include it oh that sucks well that's really cool i'm gonna have to get a dvd of uh of antibodies because i would love to watch it with the storyboard subtitles to me that was the bible the storyboard like the actors in the movie they i've seen interviews where they talk about and they're like yeah it was so weird to have a movie where literally everything was storyboarded not just the action scenes but everything and they said that's just the way christian albert works um he he plans literally everything out from start to finish for every single scene so that you go in you knock out the

scene he knows exactly what he wants and you get it and that leads me to believe that these strange cuts were exactly what he wanted he storyboarded them that way he he wanted it to be odd and unsettling. Because no director minds being compared to Kubrick. I would compare Christian Albert to Kubrick in that The Shining does this exact same thing, where if you pay attention to the rooms and the cuts and the hallways in the hotel, in the movie The Shining, they don't make any sense. If you try to draw a map of the floor plan, none of it really makes any sense. And supposedly that is done intentionally to make everything feel a little dreamlike and not real dude and then you know decades later they might take that hotel and use it in a very similar movie to this called passengers it all fits together throughout the movie power meets three survivors a german woman named nadia a vietnamese man

named Man. And I think he's a cook, but he's a completely insane, crazy, dangerous cook named Leland. The interesting thing here is that none of these survivors' names are ever spoken through the entire movie. You only learn their names in the credits. That's why you call them the German lady. Yeah, German lady, the Vietnamese guy. I thought it was interesting that Nadia, the German woman um she seems to want his shoes uh she tells him to take off his shoes i guess she like sees him and she's like oh he looks like he's the same size as me i could use an extra pair of boots i think he's not the same size i don't think so either but he should have just told her about the overhead boot compartment that he fell into earlier i was gonna say if he's hallucinating this perhaps he's just still stuck right i think he's just thinking about boots because he ended up in a boot compartment and he thought that was really weird like it's so weird and also if you

have a boot compartment why would you put it overhead like boots need to go near the ground the whole thing that whole scene is weird to me like if i was organizing boots i would put them near the ground that's all i would say i think you'd have to be some kind of psychopath to put a boot compartment over people's heads it's just weird right at least a psychopath to imagine that's where they are yeah exactly before he runs into nadia he sees who he thinks is nadia but is actually a man who is hanging from like a tripwire trap that's wrapped around his neck and then later on in a scene following this yeah he goes down like the exact same hallway and sees like the exact same guy hanging from the exact same trap news thing only this time he's live. And also, this time, he's played by Norman Reedus, who is a very famous actor. So there's an interesting tidbit about that. Norman Reedus had worked with Christian Albert

before. And the story goes that he like, really liked working with Christian Albert. And he heard that Christian Albert was making another movie. So he like, begged him for a role. He was like, I'll take anything just like any any even a small role. Just let me be in your movie, thou great director. Yeah, I can tone it down. He heard that Christian Albert was he was making another movie and he loved working with him so much that he asked if he could be a part of it. And Christian Albert created the character of Shepard just for him. Is that true? It's half true. I had a project that's still not made. That was my first professional script. But I was 16 when I when I first wrote it and I worked on it and reinvented it a couple of times. And finally, it got to a point where I was prepping the movie with Norman Reedus as a lead. That was supposed to be even before Antibodies, my international feature debut.

When I made Antibodies, we were both kind of a little bit frustrated. We still weren't doing this other movie. And then I said, you know, what would be funny if you just do this little bit part where you have one line in German and everything else is silent. I don't know if you've seen it, but he's basically the lead for eight minutes and then his part is done. He visited me unrelated to that like a year later, and he got in a very, very, very serious car crash in Berlin. And he was now in a foreign country all alone, in shock in the middle of the night. And I basically rushed to the hospital and he couldn't travel for, I don't remember exactly, but it was like four or five weeks. He had to go to multiple surgeries. All this time, I was basically with him because I needed to translate. I needed to organize visits from friends, all that kind of stuff, right? And then when Antibody's debuted, right when the credits were running, he's like, dude,

I want to be in all your movies. A few years later, I called him for some other tiny TV movie, a German one, where basically everyone you would never heard of. And then there's Norman Reedus. You know what his fee was? He's like, I do the scene, I fly over, but only if I can do the scene with Romeo, which was my dog that he loved you know i do but only with romeo so you know there's a scene in a german tv movie that i don't even have a copy where norman reed is acting with the dog so that's fun and then on pandorum i didn't make up the role the role was always there and he doesn't remember it because i talked about this again with him a few years back when he was already in the middle of walking dead craze and he was like remembering it differently in my mind it was 99.9 that he called me and said, dude, I want to be shepherd. And I was shocked, but he doesn't remember. He thinks I asked him to be shepherd. So there's two versions. I'll give you both. Now we know the

other side of the story. That is an incredible backstory to a very, very small role in your film.

On the way to engineering at some point, Bauer saw what he thought was one of the hunters. When he sees that guy, he starts shaking uncontrollably again, which is another symptom of pandorum and he knows this because he then calls up peyton and says hey peyton so pandorum have you ever felt the symptoms no he specifically asks have you ever felt the symptoms which to me is like i'm feeling the symptoms of pandorum right like he's telling him like hey so you know how it feels and then peyton is just like whoa pandorum why would you even bring that up and then uh peyton tells him the story of the eden the biggest effing catastrophe in space travel the flight cautionary tale from hell this is where we get probably the most descriptive uh descriptions that's good keep going this is where we get like it probably the most uh because she's little and small yeah this is probably where we get the best description of what pandorum actually

is uh peyton says two years into their shift one of the officers had a psychological breakdown the doctors referred to it as ods syndrome but the pilots we call it pandorum drove him insane he became convinced that the flight was cursed evil and then bauer says what did he do and peyton says he evacuated the ship he launched them all into oblivion 5 000 people sent to their death with push of a button which i why why do they have a button to shoot all the hyper sleep pods into random directions into space i've i have actually heard a lot of people ask that question and even cite that as a reason they didn't like this movie no i love it but i will say that at the end of the movie it shows us there's a reason for that it's so that you can just shoot people out and they'll float in the water and then exactly they'll be okay and in this situation all these people are asleep, they literally can't do anything. So if, for example, the ship's like on fire and

exploding, yeah, it could be useful to have a button to eject them all. What do we know about Pandorum? It causes people to be irrational, to have psychological breakdowns, to be paranoid, and then to cause the ship to shoot all the hypersleep pods out into space. That's not just something that happened once. That is a key symptom that happens with Pandora. It is. Why else would they have included it? It's around this point that Peyton meets Gallo, a figment of his imagination, in the slime tube. I love that slime tube that he emerges from. It's where you birth another version of yourself in your own mind. That's pretty cool.

corporal gallo turns out to be much like the popcorn he is not real i actually like how they very slowly clue you into yeah they make things just weirder and weirder and weirder but first he's like naked i love it and just shivering and you're like okay but then and then he's like angry he's like evil yeah the next scene he's randomly wearing a outfit with the big name tag peyton on the front it's so good and also as soon as peyton's the the other the real peyton well as soon as peyton sees him he gets a nosebleed and the next scene gallo has a nosebleed yes that's really good it's um i i like i really like this movie i just think it's so so well made nadia she takes them to the hypersleep chamber and she says this is their main hunting ground i like that because like you know where are they going to get food there's no food on this ship so like they literally have to just kind of wait until hyper sleep chambers open up and there's

your food like eat that person like i think it's so well thought out they're almost like little cans of flesh for the mutants but they're only opening as god puts them through the power search Like they're God, you know, like from time to time, there's a new settler to eat, but only, you know, when there's a power surge. So we imagine this primitive culture that revolves all around these parts, you know. We talked about Gallo. He explains to Peyton, he says, oh, there's something wrong with the people on the bridge. It was Pandorum. I had to defend myself. And then Peyton's like, oh, yeah, OK, both of them had Pandorum. Gallo's like, you don't believe me, do you? If you would have seen them, you would have done the same thing, sir. Do you know the symptoms of Pandorum? Orbital dysfunctional syndrome, Pandorum? Ever witness the symptoms firsthand? It's not something you can easily detect.

It starts with a shiver, an itch, a slow boil. The biological side effects of flying deep space feeding into paranoia. And the paranoid brain feeding the side effects. A downward spiral. A descent into madness. There's no shutting off the heat. No matter what you do, it'll boil over. Don't you believe me? Now, what he's describing here is the plot of the movie, pretty much. It's exactly what Bauer is experiencing, how every time he sees something, that thing scares him. And then he imagines how that thing could be worse. And then it gets worse. Yeah. And then I love how he says, there's no shutting off the heat. No matter what you do, it'll boil over. Because that's what Bauer's trying to do. He has to get to the core to shut off the heat. Yes. I think there's a purposeful analogy here as for, you know, the descent into madness that Bauer is currently going through, like physically, trying to shut off the heat of

the ship and the mental state that Gallo describes that you get into when you are experiencing the effects of Pandorum. Gallo also says that we all know Pandorum is greatly affected by any substantial psychological trauma it has an emotional trigger effect so i think that this is again kind of implying the reason that bauer in particular might be experiencing pandorum every time he sleeps every time he closes his eyes he thinks back to the substantial psychological trauma of his wife leaving him and then him leaving her when he left here isn't it great how like most of the time he remembers her she's just like posed all angelic on the bed smiling at him batting her eyelashes and then the very last flashback suddenly she's crying and she's like oh it's a complete turnaround he experienced two kind of intercoupled psychological traumas one she left him two he left her and that together brought about this delusion that the earth is gone right because

to him the earth is gone that is suspicious no matter what yeah how can the earth be gone like a final transmission that says you're all that's left and then they scanned how and yes the earth's gone it's just not there it was there one minute ago now it's gone yes it's like there would be you would see a comet you would see debris if it was destroyed and also what's this uh dennis quaid suggests like it had to have been nuclear or a comet and i'm like it doesn't matter no i'm like no quickly a comet could have destroyed it like nuclear might destroy everything on it but the planet would still be there now i don't know how they're doing this scan but presumably by now they're uh like six years into the mission right and i believe they're moving at light speed or actually faster than light speed which i'll explain later but either way for them to scan the earth or any celestial bodies around the earth that sort of scan would have to be conducted at

light speed because you would have to send out like radio waves which are light waves to where the earth is and then see what bounces back and so it would take double the amount of time at least that it took them to get where they are so they'd have to wait six years to see what happened and by then it would be time for the next shift it's just really weird that they could even receive this message and then that they could perform this scan and then that they could get instantaneous results it seems like Bauer's psychological trauma creating his greatest fear which is that the earth is gone it will never come back so eventually just moving along with the plot they get caught by the cook Leland he puts them to sleep as he tells them the truth that the earth was destroyed and the three on duty officers received the message then went nuts fought only one survived and then he decided to he puts them to sleep with all this giant

yeah well information dump he sure did i mean at least it's done in a cool way i like that they portray what happened centuries ago as a legend a myth he drew pictures on the wall yeah well no i think he didn't draw those pictures someone else did like they were here when he moved in and they became like his religion is what they're implying um i think it's really cool i love that kind of like generational information passing these three officers received the message that earth had been destroyed they fought each other one of them survived instead of going back to sleep he decided to carry out evil experiments on the crew and passengers opening pods to provide food for the species that he was breeding them into and then he got bored and went back to sleep i love the scene because the mythology behind leland the cook is that he doesn't you know there's this cave drawings in the wall or from people that came before him that found this shelter because it's very easily

defensible like you have this upper ring he's interpreting these cave drawings and that's why his language is so weird and he's doing it almost like a song you know because he's been that's all he had for newspaper you know and in my mind he didn't tell it the first time he basically tells it while he's drugging them and for me that's like a spider in his web like he lures them in with food and information and basically gassing them and then later eating them and by the way that was funny though when like i don't know was it two years later i i saw uh predators oh yeah yes they had the exact same scene the same scene i couldn't believe it i thought that was uh very funny for me yeah i was i mean i didn't know i caught me unaware i watched it in the theater i i thought it was fun and then all of a sudden i said that's a little bit like my scene i'm like wait a minute that's a lot like my scene and then when the twist comes I'm like okay this is really

our scene no they must have been inspired by your film is all I can say there's a cool shot when Gallo he's standing in front of a mirror and he smashes this mirror and then there's just like three frames showing Peyton reflected in the mirror as it shatters not gallo so that's pretty cool bauer convinces leland to work with them they all get out they all decide to go after the reactor together bauer has to crawl over a pit of sleeping hunters sleeping mutants which is pretty cool how they sleep i thought it was a cool scene yeah well and again this is uh alluding to how uh we should get breed on here but this is alluding to how archaeologists believe that like ancient humans would like you know nest together um that like to keep each other warm they would basically just sleep in massive bundles of people but i do think it's a little weird how like they're crossing a bridge the bridge breaks man holds it up yeah he's

a man he just like holds it up with one arm he's like i will hold one arm he holds up metal bridge big metal bridge that would be heavy enough on its own as and as we see it is much as like a car but he's holding up with two people on it 30 people when it falls and they die and uh yeah so like he's holding it up and nadia's on it and bauer is on it and then bauer for some reason is like i don't know how nadia predicts he's going to do this because it's stupid she's like don't let go and then he lets go i'm like i think we're supposed to assume he did that to help man assuming man couldn't hold it up but i'm like dude if he can hold it up at all i don't think your weight matters right yeah like he could have kept holding that up for a while as we see like he could have kept holding it up forever he just drops it just to help them no he's so cool i love man and then he 1v1s the baddest of the bad guys the guy who we've been seeing through

the whole movie. He takes him on and he beats him. And I'm just like, oh, he's so cool. Usually, I don't love worlds where everybody can kind of do martial arts. So you hired an MMA fighter? No, but I was thinking, you know, this is a few hundred years from now, you know, and already we are doing so much self-actualization and self-improvement online. And everybody takes so much care about how their body is built and how they learn self-defense. I'm like, you know, in this future society that is so overcrowded and is so dangerous of course they would all learn these kind of techniques it's nothing for me it wasn't they're all civilians but they have some fighting moves the guy he beats is like the leader of the hunters the strongest hunter we've seen him lots of times he's dangerous he's bad news he's the boss of the movie and he's beaten by man man takes him on one-on-one it took three of them to kill like a other random dude yes this

is the chieftain here you know this is the boss and he dies fighting a kid exactly that that's that's where i'm going with this first of all he is also like he's literally sacrificing himself for the greater good right here so it's actually okay to kill him here yeah because he is doing it to lead this army of hunters away from people who are fixing the reactor so they don't all die right so it is actually okay to kill him here except that he wins which is cool because he's awesome and he beats the boss of the whole movie and then to do a surprise kill seconds after that like it's a callback but what is it saying he wanted to kill that baby earlier and they Nadia stopped him which turned out to be a bad idea then and then he sees the baby again continues to not kill it and it's also a bad idea like it's it's like they wanted some sort a small arc here but i think that the message is like compassion is human nature is uncaring right

like nature doesn't give a crap and these things are just evolved from nature and they don't care about you and they're just going to do their thing and you know if you show compassion it will come back to you i think more likely this represents the strong self-sacrificing sympathetic part of Bauer's mind being killed and he goes totally psycho after this because he doesn't have his conscience which he couldn't understand anyway because it speaks a different language than he does so Bauer gets back to the bridge right we find out that Peyton was Corporal Gallo all along he was younger and lower rank than Bauer uh originally he's just been awake longer also he injects himself with a sedative that seems to stop it doesn't do anything to like split personality but doesn't cure his psychosis and it doesn't put him to sleep he's like able to 1v2 them in just a second so yeah i don't know that's probably the only reason they had to get rid of man because if

he was there yeah absolutely we would have been over destroyed peyton but i really love how surprised like how genuinely surprised peyton is when bauer announces that he says you're the one who received the final transmission you stayed awake you broke the rotation you killed your crew and then peyton looks up with like puppy dog eyes and it's like oh how the hell would you know that which is a good question how would he know that like he might have guessed a lot of stuff that was going on but not that like it's i think it's supposed to be that he somehow gathered that from the story leland was telling which no and makes sense from a viewer perspective because we got hints along the way but if you just listen to Leland's story it actually doesn't make that much sense like if you're just listening to it I don't think you told it in a really weird like God came on and and God went back to sleep like it's like a religious sermon it really feels like a religious

or a legendary experience that he's that guy was great he's been a kind of a small time struggling actor for a long time and Pandorum was a big turning point for him for me it's very tragic that he died but I'm also happy that he had such an interesting time because we shot this in Germany at Studio Babelsberg and he is from LA and he traveled here and he used to be homeless for a while and then he picked himself up he got into acting and then he won the casting against some big names and he was so into it that he felt like this set has to be lived in for him because he's supposedly lived there for a long time so he slept in the studio in this in the set to live there before his big scene he slept on the set yeah for like three feet and you know these sets are huge like they're in big big uh factory like you know buildings super scary i i bet yeah like that'd be so creepy but one night he got caught by security he weren't aware that he was supposed to be there

So he had a really, really tough night once where basically he held him for a while. He's like, no, no, I'm an actor. I'm allowed to be here. Oh, no. Yeah, no, he was the nicest people I ever worked with. And it's very sad to see him go. That was one dedicated actor. Peyton reveals to them that there are no stars outside. Something's really wrong. Like, I think that maybe Peyton believes that they have reached like the heat death of the universe. And there's no stars left. be what he believes but he should know that they haven't because he can see on the view screen right in front of them that they have only been traveling for 923 years um and it wouldn't take that long for the heat death of the universe so it'd take like trillions but yeah either way nadia calls him over and reveals that they're underwater suddenly there's luminescent fish everywhere they've already crashed and they've been on tanis all this time talking about twists

Anyway, I always thought, okay, one of these ideas was what if they traveled until space time almost is over. That's where this little moment comes from when there's no stars that I love. But I even love more than these fish show up, which is one of the shots that even we had a very low budget for these effects. But I think these sea creatures are amazing. I really think they're still hold up today. And for me, that's another twist. The Gallo-Payton twist is the one where clever people would probably guess it. So I always served that. I'm like, you know, I'm going to give little hints for the smart people out there. So they're going to be feeling secure that they figured out the twist. And that was to distract from the even bigger twist that they're underwater in Antanas. Double twist. You know, the one twist is basically not really important. and has been done by the likes of Fight Club and these movies.

But that's not the one we're holding back. The other one is not the real twist. And we're also telegraphing it. There's all this water dripping in. There's moss on the walls of the ship breaking down. But yeah, no one ever sees that coming when they watch the movie. 100%. When I watched the movie the first time, I was like, okay, Gallo and Peyton, they're the same person. And then I was like, they're underwater. What? I never saw that coming. But Bauer decides to pull the sick out of Peyton with a pair of pliers in his mouth. That's, yeah, that's weird. So, I mean, this is just representative and the whole scene is representative of Bauer just really losing it. Like he goes nuts in this scene. He's out of it. There's a weird shot, too, where he looks up and he sees a panel in the ceiling that has been blocked by a wrench. Yeah, but that panel was blocked by a wrench in the other room. In the other room, not the bridge.

They couldn't get into the bridge. Peyton did it while he wasn't there, which to me, him seeing that panel in this room implies that he is Peyton because he knew about that panel somehow, which he wouldn't have known about. And he got confused as to which room he did it in. So he's just remembering it being here when it's actually not. And I really like how he's imagining that these creatures, this is the best evidence that they don't really exist. These creatures are coming out of like, like computer panels on the wall, which they couldn't be coming out of it's a computer panel there's nothing in there and then they do come out of it but then it flashes and it shows oh they're just like burned wires he shoots the monster and then he sees what's really there and he just shot a computer and he's like oh crap and he starts to realize that he's experiencing pandorum because later on he he asks nadia to confirm to him he's

like can you see that guy can you see him we can see a view screen that peyton put up to show them how long they've been traveling. And this is the interesting thing. It stops at 923 years. It also has stopped at 4,555LY. It says distance, 4,555LY, which I'm assuming means light years. How could they travel 4,555 light years in less than 923 years, unless they're traveling faster than light. The other interesting thing I noticed is that when he turns on the display, it starts out at like 61 mission years, and then slowly ticks up to 923 mission years. So I think what happens is that like last time this display was turned on, they were at 61 mission years. So then now it has to like catch up or something. You mentioned that the text in the movie should correspond with the story of the movie. And I noticed one thing that to me kind of confirms that they never reached Tannus. The distance measurement starts high.

It starts out, I think it's at like 9,150-ish light years, or it might be 6,150-ish. It's kind of blurry. And then it ticks down. And this is the most interesting and best evidence I have that they never even reached Tannus. It does not tick down to zero. it ticks down to 4,555 light years. So they've still got a long way to go. That's all I can say is that the distance measurement started high. It ticked down and it never ticked down to zero. It only ticked down to 4,555 light years. So it seems to me like they never reached their destination. They're still out in deep space. I mean, that is done in post by... That's what I figured. So no worries. And, you know, it's too long ago. It wasn't done on purpose. If it is there, I have to check it out myself. But it's a different set of artists. When you go into post-production, this was done in Czechoslovakia, the whole post. So, you know, going through 980 shots,

I might have missed something. I don't know. But maybe it does make sense. And I just have to fresh up what it actually says. I don't know. Maybe you've got something. Maybe you don't. But for me, I was doing this movie 100% certain that they've reached Tannis. As Peyton and Nadia are fighting, Bauer, he tries to shoot the monsters that are breaking in and then realizes it's just a computer panel. And his shot causes the window to crack, which then bursts open and starts letting the water in. Now, this is a shot from his weird arm thing. Yeah, his riot suppression gun. You can read, like, they've meticulously documented this weapon. Like, there's panels up next to it which explain everything about it. really cool it explains not only like the optimum range but also how far it can shoot it even describes how you can adjust like the focal point of the gun to change its range like you have to use apparently you have to use a special wrench which is provided in the case

that the gun is stored in and you have to adjust like the discrepancy disc or something manually with this wrench is really cool he needs one of those focal length adjusters for his laser razor i know he does no but it's so cool it even says how much like it says the type of ammo it uses i mean it doesn't just exactly say what it is but it's measured in milligrams um and it says how much it has and how much it uses per second cool it's very cool that they bothered to make all that documentation about this weapon like that's just amazing to me i was hiring like for the for the non-lethal weapon you know the crowd control weapon and some some of these things i i hired technical engineers that are working for you know like mercedes or nokia to design future things that was a real industrial design made by someone who's not working in movies usually and and think about these things. As the ocean pours into the ship,

so as they're ascending in this pod that is filled with water, I love how he takes like, so each one of these cryosleep pods has a respirator that, you know, is supposed to help you to breathe. He takes the respirator and shoves it into her mouth and commands her to breathe. And then she like is really worried, but she does it. And then immediately all the air comes out of her mouth and she like drowns. And so that respirator is not working and it's not working in universe. Like this isn't a mistake because then he looks at the tubes and starts fiddling with them frantically and looks at her and his eyes are wide with horror. And he's like, oh, no, I just killed her. It's really good. Like the acting and the writing again is just top notch. The attention to details and saying like, yeah, of course, the respirator isn't working. this cryosleep pause not active you moron you just drowned your girlfriend what are you doing

i love it i i can't get enough of this movie i love it so much they they emerge in a calm sea the cryosleep chambers in the ship they are all ejected and they all slowly one after another rise from the ocean and it seems to be a happy ending and as the camera pans out to a satellite view you get the caption tanis year one population 1213 except that what just happened is exactly what happened to the first guy who had pandorum where he went completely crazy and he caused all the pods to eject into space because he thought that would save everybody i'm sure in his mind it did i'm sure he thought yes we're all rising in the ocean and we're all going to repopulate the planet. But then, you know, he died because he didn't. And I think that's exactly what happened to poor Lieutenant Bauer. I think he murdered every single sleeping passenger on this ship. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, it's why it's called Pandorum. Why would you call it that? Pandorum was honestly

inconsequential. Pandorum was completely inconsequential unless it was the ending of the movie and i can't wait to hear uh what christian albert has to say about that because i've literally been dreaming of asking him about this for like a decade now this was the whole reason that i signed on to your idea for this podcast because i was like someday if this podcast gets big enough i'll be able to ask christian albert if the true meaning of pandorum was that they all died in the end i'm glad we finally got big enough i know well there's the thing about endings right i mean i think that in regular movies talking mainstream not so much horror movies or horror movies specifically i think that every once in a while there's a movie that has a bad tragic ending that's a shocker and i think we all should be grateful for this one movie because it makes the happy endings of the 99 percent of other movies more tense because you're never sure in horror

it's the other way around in horror i almost check out because i know all these motherfuckers they're gonna kill everyone at the end anyway so when it comes to pandorum i was like you know we killed enough people um it everybody expects us to go super dark because the movie telegraphs that so it's actually a nicer surprise yeah i have a somewhat happy ending i mean it's still they're on a strange foreign planet with hardly any equipment and they have to survive this shit so it's not like super super happy but it is optimistic let's put it this way talking about series i mean the whole metaphor for me was we are all on a spaceship that we share right it's life and things things are out of whack and we're basically fucking it up and we fucked up planet a and now they're on planet b there's a few really cool deleted scenes um there is a hilarious alternate version of bauer waking up from his cryosleep pod where as soon as he has like you

know regained his wits um he gets up off the floor and just like rushes back to the pod and grabs the nourishment tube and starts guzzling down the blue fluid from within it just like greedily slurping it up and sucking and sucking on it and then as he's doing this the camera slowly pans over and he spots a gigantic sign that says warning do not ingest enzyme fluid after awakening from hypersleep and then his eyes get wide and he starts throwing up everywhere it was hilarious i don't know why they deleted it it was so funny it was amazing i mean i guess it didn't have quite the tone that they wanted but like that was quality comedy like i was laughing actually that's kind of an important scene though because it explains why they had to eat other people to survive i guess because you could just suck on the enzymes there was this fear by some of the producers that this is you know i don't know like funny or bad funny or something but to

me it was again super interesting and it was you know a nice little moment that i love that It fleshes out this world a little bit more. And I didn't think it was funny. I thought it was great, you know. I know there's like an alternate ending, which I was really, I did not expect this at all, but it had Peyton slash Gallo surviving and draining the water out of the ship. And then behind him, Gallo's standing there and he's like, well, if you're going to be captain, what are we going to do now? And then Peyton smiles. What was that all about? That threw me for aloof. Was he going to be like the main bad guy in the sequels or something? Yeah, that was an idea. Like I said, you toy around with things. We wanted to do two more movies if this had been more successful. The idea was that the second movie would go back to Earth and start this massive undertaking of building the spaceship in space.

young gallo basically being already kind of weird and being someone who's not chosen for the for the uh mission and he takes the place of his brother by killing him in space elevator all these things and it was it was basically getting the timeline a second time to um tannis uh where the first act or half of the movie we didn't really develop it to a script form but where basically you start on earth again and then end up telling what we already know and in an interesting way about the hunters and how they came to be in another group of survivors and they also end up in tannis so that we have a set of characters that is interesting enough and well known and then the third movie was supposed to be um both group of characters that we know from both movies together on Tannis in a new planet with new threats and new politics and how to conquer a planet. So that was the trilogy idea that I loved and where there was many, many cool concepts that

we would have put in there. And if it's all in Bauer's head, then there's no way you can... That wouldn't work. There is a very active Facebook group called Fans for Pandorum Sequel. It's got lots of people and they've all joined up and they're all just clamoring for a sequel to Pandorum. Yeah, they're super nice people. They invited me, I joined them. I sometimes post on it under my real name. So you can find me there. And you know what it turned into? In the beginning, they were enthusiastic because there were some examples of fan movements reactivating or rejuvenating projects. So they were trying to do that in the beginning. which didn't pan out but it basically is still a nice group of like-minded people that recognize each other through pandorum but they recommend mostly other movies books right now for fans of pandorum and i think that's a nice thing is it true that your your daughter was turned into a

monster for for pandora the greatest monster in pandorum is my daughter who is not a monster at all she's uh she's actually a part-time actress still she's she has a big part in slow burn that was the first role and she i didn't know she was gonna show up at the casting she just went on her own because that was a kids casting because we needed kids to be in these costumes and she just went and she was really honestly the best one in this in this casting and i didn't think so myself but my ad who did the casting came to me and says you're not gonna like this uh the one i think is the best is your daughter and i'm like oh i have no problem with it whatsoever but she did long hours in makeup and it's very hard to do that and she was also a little bit disturbed when i told her now to eat the guy you know she was fine i mean she was like nine or something yeah she's really young i was super proud how she did it i think that's one of the best scenes in the movie is

when she kills man she's just super creepy and that i mean the way she kills her head and all that stuff she she had a neck she had a neck for it i don't know she was really cool so there is another theory that i thought of while watching this that uh pandorum is a prequel midquel to passengers if you don't know passengers uh it's a movie that we covered in the past that was a good episode so you should listen to it yeah it's a 2016 film with chris pratt uh and jennifer lawrence And it's about a guy waking up alone on a ship. It's very similar to Pandora. Okay, so here are my evidences that this could possibly even be the same ship. The ships look exactly the same. They look exactly the same. It's a long cylinder that is circled by sharp, round things. I don't even know really how to describe them, except that it is, it's just, yeah, circled by these weird spiky arms. Both the ships look like that.

And that seems a little odd to me. The Pandoram ship is called the Elysium, and it's going to Tannis. The passenger ship is called the Avalon, and it's going to Homestead 2. Now, Elysium and Avalon are both kind of like these mythological, similar kind of sounding names. And Homestead 2 is clearly a nickname. The planet could honestly be called Tannis. Or like a scientific designation, right? Yeah. The planet could be called Tannis. We don't know. Now, interestingly, though, the Elysium, its travel length was supposed to be 123 years. The Avalon in passengers, its travel length was supposed to be 120 years, which is pretty similar. That's too close for comfort. Now, supposedly the Avalon is only carrying 5,000 passengers and the Elysium was carrying like 60,000. Well, there you go. It can't be the same. How are you going to reconcile that? Well, I mean, by the end, it's only like 1,200, maybe just another 60.

Oh, you're right. There's not even 5,000 people. They're planning for most of them to die. It was like, well, we know they won't all make it. So we'll just say 5,000. But I think it's just, I mean, there are obviously ways to prove this thing false. But I think it's a fun thought experiment to just sort of imagine it if you've seen both. Because there are just similarities with like, they wake up and, oh, somebody's been trying to break into the bridge. And then you see it from Chris Pratt's perspective in Passengers. And he was spending most of his time trying to break into the bridge. You could make the argument that Chris Pratt from Passengers woke up. He did his thing. He woke up Aurora, eventually killed her, as we proved, put himself back to sleep. But they had kids. And their kids just kept, you know, inbreeding and turned into mutants and ended up destroying the ship so it doesn't look nice anymore.

And then when other people wake up, you know, like at the end of Passengers, when all the people come out, the ship is like, you know, overgrown it's overgrown yeah i think that's the good evidence that the ship changed and it's possible the rest of it looks all like dark and murky and drippy and they just never went to those sections inbred children are running around hunting people down so uh which is kind of the plot of this movie dennis quaid woke up and then went back to sleep after ruining everything you know that's that's what chris brad could have done there is you know whether or not anyone's willing to admit it i can see where some of the ideas and concepts and even like shots and like cinematography uh in pandorum have influenced like i said big budget like hollywood movies um like predators and uh passengers um and even other other sci-fi movies from this yeah predators passengers pandora oh man anyway i just think that it shows that you know even if

it might not be the most well-known sci-fi movie and even if it didn't have the reception that they'd hoped for um it is legitimately a very good sci-fi movie um and it deserved to you know make a lot more money and make a way bigger splash than it did so if you haven't seen pandorum you should go see pandora yeah um i think your theory is good like we've already talked about why call it pandorum unless it's really about pandorum which it is and he does the thing you do when you get pandorum which is eject everyone the film ends with the main character bauer who has been shaky mentally unstable and then we find out hallucinating and believing that the ship is evil and cursed to the point where he's incredibly paranoid i just i can't get over the fact that they introduce pandorum as being the disease that makes you eject all of why show the flashback and then the movie ends with him ejecting all the hypersleep pods it's like yeah come on and i like

the way it doesn't spell it out like most people who watch this will just take it at face value yeah he saved the day he got away from the mutants now he killed them all yeah it's fun it's this theory for me is not correct specifically since we wanted to do two more movies uh if this had been more successful we'll have to get you those two sequels uh then we can answer those questions i'm so busy but i was you know i sometimes get questions and travis the writer as well i mean He's one of the absolute creators of this. And we both get sometimes questions about how, what if we do a comic book? What if we do a novel? You should. That would be awesome. Well, thanks so much for joining us. Music for this episode was provided by Christine. Extra special thanks to Christian Albert for being willing to come on the podcast. Super fun talking to him and meant a lot to me. I've always wanted to ask him about Pandoram.

So, you know, this is like a great wish being fulfilled for me so besides that uh if you want to show us your support you can find us on patreon if you like what we're doing want us to keep doing it we are a completely independent podcast um we are not owned by any other company you're not beholden to any sort of corporate rules or laws we have no sponsors um we pay for everything out of our pocket and we are also not trying to make a profit doing this podcast if you like what we're doing and you want us to keep doing it every every single bit of support counts so head on over to patreon and support us today it really means the world to us so that was fun guys great to be here have fun with this episode and always remember that popcorn isn't real