Originality is for all intents and purposes a finite commodity in today’s saturated markets. That said, the makers of Pandorum took some standard sci-fi elements and forged them into an interesting story, if not an original one.

We join the survivors of a colony expedition in deep space, as they attempt to piece together what’s happened to their ship, crew and mission while they’ve been in cryogenic stasis. Add a little “I Am Legend” and some lamoe action (last man on earth - thanks Max Brooks for that brilliant term!) and a splash of 30 Days of Night and you’ve got a movie. More precisely, you’ve got the film Pandorum.

Good effects, predictable plot, and cannibals all take a backseat a rather subdued but competent performance by Dennis Quaid. Personally, I think Dennis is capable of much more, but was working a character that was rather two dimensional.

Regardless, Pandorum plays like an easy sci-fi flick, and the DVD will make great shelf filler, being pulled off occasionally when a guest says “Oh, I sorta wanted to see that.”

What we have in this film is the fourth installment of a rapidly failing franchise. We can all look back into the dim memories of the early 80’s and see Arnold Schwarzenegger terminating his way through Los Angeles. But since those mythical times, the Terminator’s tale has become a tired cliché with episodic installments each trying to “out-explode” the last one.

I saw it anyway. And, frankly, I was pleasantly surprised. The plot certainly was not without holes, but it was simple enough to not get bogged down in insulting exposition. There were enough characters to take the focus away from Bale, who, while a fine actor, felt flat and uninspired in the role of John Connor, Savior of the Human Race. In fact, the other characters carried much of the emotional burden of the film.

As expected in the 21^st century, the special effects were excellent. And while I still can’t figure out why, during the final epic battle in the Terminator factory, Skynet didn’t just turn on more terminators (since, you know, one was giving our heroes a run for it), I enjoyed the film very much. Though it’s my own personal bias, I feel I’ve got to pipe up about Time Travel. In a nutshell, it’s can’t happen. Information as we know it cannot travel faster than the event that caused it. No effect then cause. So why can’t Hollywood drop the Jack-Tripper Time Travel Trope and invest just a few more seconds into their writing? I know time travel was an integral part of the Terminator plot, and wasn’t so much so in Terminator: Salvation, however, John Connor was well aware of the potential for paradox and based his actions on that knowledge. Yawn.

The action sequences were top-notch and I think we can all agree that bringing more hardware to bear on the Terminator problem is exactly what we needed to do.

The cast was expertly selected, each filling their role to a tee. Of course, there’s no end to background material, and I doubt seriously that once on set the question was asked “What’s my motivation?” Still, McCoy and Spock stole the show, barreling over even James T. Kirk in their replication of past favorites.

There were some plot problems, however. First off, “red matter” was just a little silly. The armed and armored Romulan mining vessel scrubbed a whole fleet? What are they mining, Death Stars? Then of course, there was the Deus Ex Machina moments – like Kirk happening to land within walking distance of Future Spock’s self imposed exile cave. Another major problem was what I refer to as the “cheat.”

When Sulu is unable to get the Enterprise into gear we miss a major space battle. I don’t know about you, but I was there *for* the space battle. Simply put, we were cheated, either by a studio’s graphics budget or a director who thought his plot was better served by flaming all of Starfleet and denying three generations of loyal fans a chance to witness it. In either case, we deserved more.

That said, Star Trek was overall a fine piece of sci-fi cinema.

In my writing career I stumble across writers and readers who wrinkle their little noses at the mere mention of science fiction, as if writing a gut-spilling tell all piece about how you can’t reconcile your feelings of abandonment and resentment towards your dead mother somehow projects your writing into the realm of literature. Personally, if I want to read about people suffering, I’ll pick up the newspaper.

For me, the appeal of science fiction is the constant conflict between our need for technology, our desire to master our environment through technology and what those factors do to our humanity.

A quick side note – because I know some folks are reading this saying well, “What’s His Name” is more widely read than “Sci-fi author.” This is true. But widely read translates to “easily understood.”
That’s right, I said it. Popular equates simple. I digress.

I started a fantasy story some months ago and one of my readers said to me “You just didn’t believe it, did you?”

I thought, what an interesting comment from Mr. Dungeons & Dragons Two Nights A Week. But, in retrospect, he was right. I didn’t buy my own snake oil. As I hacked out this convoluted story, I found I was falling back on my sci-fi tropes of time-location-distortion, expanding lexicons, invention. It made the fantasy setting feel muddled, like a veneer of dragons painted over the hull of an ancient galactic warship, in an attempt to hide the pitting and scars it had suffered in its centuries-long life of almost constant warfare.

I am not comfortable in the fantasy genre. I’m not it, it’s not me. My readers can detect that, and it becomes a constant battle with my inner editor, as well as my sense of story to complete a fantasy tale. It’s good to experience and try out many genres. But for most of us, one or another becomes like a second home, and we tend to find our focus there.

As with all things, humans want to attempt to push their need for order as far as it will go, categorizing and sub categorizing, entire catalogues of data. Indexing and cross –referencing until nothing makes sense.

Then again, critics need something to talk about, and if it couldn’t be described as a sub-genre or a trendy Rom-Com, Dramedy, Thrimedy or whatever, I suppose they’d just say they hated it and leave it at that.

In college, sci-fi always got a hard wrap, I’m not sure why. Stories about unresolved child-parent relationships and unrequited love seem to be the hallmark of literature, or an overly lengthy tale about growing up in some urban shit-hole without enough supervision and the inability to judge danger…

I think it was primarily because sci-fi is not only hard to write, but it’s hard to read and understand. Let’s face it, sci-fi fans tend to have a better understanding of science than say, Dan Brown’s audience, who seem to have a better understanding of Fairies and Angels. So, imagine a novice writer attempting to hack out a sci-fi tale – take his inaccurate understanding of say, quantum tunneling, compound that with his learning status as a writer, and perhaps even his bad taste, and you’ve got a story that’s going to suck something fierce.

During one of my screenwriting classes, a classmate turned in a full-length script about the space-battleship Velvet. I was polite in class, but the second I was out of earshot, safely on the train, I laughed like a lunatic all the way to the bar.

His poor understanding of military structure (seems like his knowledge of the army and navy was based on Star Trek – which we all love, but we know to senior office in any outfit is going to land on a hostile planet, even if he might get laid in the bargain), novice writing style and bad taste made for a tale that was nothing short of hilarious.

I never read his whole script, but can you imagine being in deep space, the ranking office on a behemoth, so powerful it might as well have a star for heart, so vast it cannot be traversed by foot, so grim and ominous that whole worlds have surrendered to it’s mere mention…

And then the Battleship Velvet drops of our warp space. It’s high and proud hull painted with rainbow stripes…and does what? Offers to do your nails?

This, is why most sci-fi sucks.