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Don't fear the end of the world. Fear what happens next.
Two astronauts, Bower (Foster) and
Payton (Quaid), wake up
from suspended animation to find themselves alone, with no memory of who they
are, what they are doing, or what has happened to the crew of their 60,000
passenger sleeper ship the
Elysium. They are unable to access the ship's bridge, and cannot
communicate with any other members of the crew, including the flight team they
are to relieve. While exploring the
spacecraft under Payton's radio guidance, Bower talks with Payton about
Pandorum, a psychological condition brought on by extended periods of
hyper-sleep (suspended animation) and its symptoms and effects, including severe
paranoia, vivid hallucinations, and homicidal tendencies.
As Bower explores on, he encounters dead bodies, and fast moving humanoid
creatures. Escaping from one of them, he then encounters other human survivors,
and they work together to reach the ship's nuclear reactor. The reactor will
fail permanently if Bower does not reset it soon. Moving on, the group
encounters another survivor, who tells them the story of what had happened
before they awakened. Their mission is revealed to be one of desperation. Earth,
suffering from massive overpopulation, dispatched the sleeper ship and
its crew on a 123-year voyage to a new, Earth-like planet called Tanis to create a
settlement.
When the ship receives one last message from Earth, informing them that Earth
was no more and that they were the last survivors, one of the three crew members
(as there are usually three flight crew active at any one shift) turned insane,
killed his other two crew mates, then played God by awakening most of the crew
and doing what he pleased with them. When he grew bored of it, he went back into
suspended animation and left the rest of the crew unwaken. Genetic augments that
every crew member had received prior to the mission (for quick adaptation to the
new planet) had instead adapted them to the ship, turning them into the
cannibalistic monsters that Bower and the other survivors have been
encountering. This survivor then knocks them out with gas. Upon awakening, they
find themselves chained up, with the survivor about to kill them for food.
Meanwhile, Payton discovers another crew member, Gallo, who reveals to him
that he was part of the flight crew that received the message from Earth. After
receiving the Earth's last message, Gallo gives a different account from what
Bower has heard, that the other two crew mates with Gallo had an onset of
Pandorum and, eventually, Gallo was forced to kill them in order to survive. By
now, most of the ship's population is either dead or mutated.
Bower manages to convince the survivor to allow them to restart the ship
reactor. The group fights their way to the ship's reactor, and Bower eventually
restarts it. While moving through the passenger hypersleep storage area, he sees
the pod for Payton's wife, and his memories now allow him to realize that Payton
is not who he says he is. Payton is actually Gallo, and the "Gallo" that the
audience has been seeing, is actually just the other part of "Payton's"
consciousness, and the man who has been calling himself Payton is in fact the
aged Gallo, who was the one to succumb to Pandorum and kill his other two crew
mates. Bower then fights with Payton/Gallo while simultaneously battling the
symptoms of Pandorum, and during this he inadvertently causes a hull breach. The
ship at this point is actually under water having landed on the Earth-like
planet of Tanis, their original destination. The ships log shows the mission has
been ongoing for 923 years. Water then starts pouring in, killing Payton/Gallo.
Bower escapes with the last known survivor by ejecting his hypersleep pod from
the ship. The hull breach causes the ship's computer to initiate an emergency
evacuation, ejecting the remaining 1,211 crew members still hibernating and
unmutated. These remaining survivors are then able to begin building their
settlement, finally fulfilling their mission on the new planet.
 Copyright(C) 2007
- 2020. All rights reserved.
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