Movie Reviews: Fame, Pandorum, Surrogates

PANDORUM Despite too many cheap, sound-cue scares and a slow-boil plot that veers between tension and tedium, Pandorum — a dead-serious, horror/sci-fi pastiche that unimaginatively borrows from everything from Alien to WALL-E — gets sort of interesting. Flight engineers Corporal Bower (Ben Foster) and Colonel Payton (Dennis Quaid) awake from a years-long “hyper-sleep” aboard the Elysium, a massive spacecraft launched from the increasingly uninhabitable planet Earth in 2174. With no memory of their mission, they find themselves in an abandoned wing of the craft, a predicament they discuss at great and scintillating length (“It’s cold in here!” Payton declares. “It’s fucking dark in here!” Bower retorts). Eventually, Bower ventures out to get the 411, encountering mummified corpses of his fellow crewmembers and then the gooey, writhing mutants marauding through the craft in search of human flesh. A team slowly materializes out of the terrorized survivors Bower meets on his way to try and reset the craft on its course to Tanis, an Earth-like planet. Much slimy mutant-battle ensues. Director Christian Alvart clearly attended horror’s new paint-shaker school of direction (motto: shaky = scary!), but the script’s twisty, end-of-the-world intrigue saves this otherwise leaden film from total self-destruction. (Citywide) (Michelle Orange)

GO  SURROGATESA montage of news footage crisply introduces the not-too-distant future, where the world’s white-collar professionals live vicariously through plastic-smooth swimsuit-cut surrogate bodies, psychically remote-controlled by flesh-and-blood selves abandoned to storage and pallid vegetation. These super-durable avatars are free to live in (somewhat timidly imagined) consequence-free hedonism. No real victims means no crimes, hence not much work for our FBI agent (Bruce Willis), until an unheard-of murder draws him to the ghettos of the offline human minority. As he investigates, director Jonathan Mostow takes the tired anti-authoritarian formula of dreadlocked granola resistance against well-equipped state thugs, and knots it in noir-ish contortions. Surrogates are played by human actors with the slightest emotional attenuation, recalling all-CGI movies that spend untold millions reinventing life. Willis is fine, both as his blond action figure (Zack Morris hair) and actual self, in trusty bruised palooka mode. Mostow does good meat-and-potatoes genre work, coherent even when reckless — which is why you probably don’t know his name. His Internet-era smash-up Fahrenheit 451 comes in nice and lean, with room for a couple of cherry action pieces — that surrogate bodies can be guiltlessly plowed over liberates his car chase, and Radha Mitchell does fine acrobatics in high heels. (Citywide) (Nick Pinkerton)

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More About

• Josh Harris
• Clive Owen
• Vadim Rizov
• Coco Chanel
• Anne Fontaine

THE VANISHED EMPIRE Moscow, 1973: Not a wild and swingin’ era, but veteran director Karen Shakhnazarov tries out the standard coming-of-ager anyway. Unable to take his Marxist history classes seriously, Sergey (Aleksandr Lyapin) runs around picking up girls while rocker pal Kostya (Ivan Kupreyenko) introduces him to weed, and their mutual, homely friend, Stepan (Yegor Baranovsky), does nothing in particular except be the third point of a love triangle with Sergey and his girlfriend, Lyuda (Lidiya Milyuzina). Most of The Vanished Empire’s appeal (as its title less suggests than shouts) is its evocative production design and some unique Brezhnev-era set pieces: When Sergey wants to buy a Pink Floyd record for Lyuda, he heads to a park, where nervous young men sell their pop-music “contraband” in hushed voices. But the dead-end, on-again-off-again courtship between Sergey and Lyuda bores (there’s no reason for the unstoppable horndog to worry so much about his obviously nonexistent future with a girl who has her shit together), and the standard adolescent travails take up most of the screen time. (Music Hall) (Vadim Rizov)

WANTED The bulging extremities of aging gym victim Salman Khan hang suspended in midair, surrounded by glittering beads of sweat and chunks of broken crockery — the defining visual cliché of global action cinema in the post-Matrix era. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Salman is trying to emulate the success that Aamir Khan had with last year’s Ghajini, a remake of a Tamil-language Memento clone for which Khan pumped up, shaved his head and whole-heartedly embraced the sledgehammer excess of the South Indian action aesthetic (with highly enjoyable results). Salman Khan has imported from Chennai the great dancer and choreographer-turned–barely competent director Prabhu Deva, in order to remake Deva’s 2007 Tamil hit Pokkiri, a Hard-boiled hand-me-down. Here, the often shirtless star, cast as a mass-murdering hit man with a notional heart of gold, strikes languid underwear-model poses more often than he throws punches, a routine that will be increasingly hard to stomach as the he moves from his 40s into his 50s. The film has one of Bollywood’s sexiest leading ladies, the bosomy Kewpie doll Ayesha Takia, and a first-rate villain in Mahesh Manjrekar, the crime lord Javed in Slumdog, here playing a paan-chewing cop so corrupt his glance could make the houseplants shrivel. But Khan and Deva will do just about anything for effect, and even an over-the-top amoral revenge fantasy needs a shred of internal consistency. (Culver Plaza; Fallbrook 7; Naz 8; AMC Covina 30) (David Chute)