A “Tron: Legacy” Night At The IMAX

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I don’t remember much of the original movie beyond Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) being sucked into the system and the special effects that were pretty cool back in the early 1980s when computer animation was still in its infancy. The original movie is no longer available on DVD or even Netflix Instant for viewing. That will probably change when the marketing for the new movie kicks into high gear. I kept an open mind about the half-dozen scenes that I saw, which was a challenge since I’m not a big fan of Hollywood forsaking new ideas to recycle classic movies and TV shows from the last 30 years.

The segment starts off in the real world that’s in 2D, where Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund) is informed by his father’s close friend, Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner), that he received a page from a phone number that’s been disconnected for 25 years. Why someone would keep a working pager in the modern era of cellphone texting is something that I hope the movie will explain. Sam heads down to the old arcade where his father’s office is located and turns on the circuit breaker that brings the arcade alive with the familiar sounds of multiple video game machines and a jukebox playing 1980s music. A Tron arcade machine stands alone against the wall in the back. He puts in a quarter that falls out on to the floor since it’s not an arcade token, discovers heavy scoring marks on the concrete floor, and pushes back the arcade machine to find a secret passage to his father’s lab. A still active virtual touch screen comes alive. He enters the command line, guess the password, enters the whoami command to discover that this was father’s account, and runs the last command that was executed. A camera laser sucks him into the 3D virtual world of Tron that his father had made.

The arcade scene was genuinely authentic. I used to crawl the arcade scene when I was a teenager in the early 1980s. My parents gave me a $30/week allowance. I blew half in the arcades and the other half. My parents thought that this was a strange combination, but they were relieved that I wasn’t involved in sex and drugs like too many young people in my generation. (I was really fat and nerdy back then like most of the people watching last night). I recognized Dig DugMissile Command and Pac-Manfrom the cacophony of arcade game sounds. I never played Tron that much back then. Star Wars was the hot arcade game that put you in the seat of a X-Wing fighter flying over the Death Star trench in all its vector graphics glory.

When Sam appears in the virtual world, he is immediately picked up by a recognizer, the iconic machine that picks up stray programs (people) that shouldn’t be running around lose. I don’t remember the original version at all. This one had two guards, a pilot, and about eight prisoners. Sam is locked down without any explanation and frighten by the person next to him who has only half a head. After the recognizer flies across the virtual world, it lands and the prisoners are sorted out. One prisoner runs off to jump over the side and asunder into a thousand electronic bits when hitting the next level. Sam is slated for the games. He is escorted into a room where four women stripes him of his clothing and dress him in his virtual clothing with a security disc that is also his weapon. One of them notes that he is a different kind of program before sending him off into the arena.

The next set of scenes are the virtual highlights that we expect to find: the laser disc fight to the death, the light cycle competition to create a wall of light that forces the other light cycle to crash into, and the extended cycle chase through the virtual world when Sam is rescued by the mysterious Quorra (Olivia Wilde), who reminds me of Trixie (Christina Ricci) from “Speed Racer”. She takes him to the safe house where his father has been in hiding for 25 years, where father and son are reunited. The segment blends into the trailer for the movie and comes to an end.

“Tron: Legacy” appears to be a worthy successor not only to the original movie but also to “The Matrix” series. Every decade needs to have a signature film that looks ahead to the future in both the real and virtual worlds. The 2D virtual touch screen currently exists on the Apple iPad/iPhone/Touch family of mobile devices, and one exhibtor at the 2010 MacWorld Expo demonstrated the Mac OS X desktop being projected on a desktop surface that could manipulate things. The 3D virtual world overall was very beautiful with a deep monochromatic background and bright neon colors. Some of the newer video game engines like id Software’s RAGE are becoming more photo realistic. Unlike all the other recycled movies coming out in recent years, Disney got this one right.

Howell and I turned in our 3D glasses and retrieved our cellphones. A free movie poster and a card for an Asus video card (who sponsored this event) were available. We also got coupons for to see any movie that night for $5 USD and a free drink-and-popcorn combo for our next visit. There were no good movies to watch that night. Besides, unless it was free, we couldn’t see it anyway. The combo coupon happens to expire the day before the new Harry Potter movie comes out. Bummer, AMC!

 

Are You A Freudian Or Jungian Dream Analyst?

I woke up from a dream a few days ago where I was riding a train and typing away on a manual typewriter before being thrown off the train and the typewriter being drop kicked behind me.  That’s a weird dream.  Dreams that I want to remember tend to slip away like ether into the nothingness.  Dreams that I don’t want to remember tend to linger about like Chinese food left in the kitchen wastebasket over a hot weekend.  The train dream decided to stay.

Naturally, I posted that summary to Twitter to start off my day.  I was then invited to post my dream on Freud-It, a Twitter-related dream analysis website where people can offer their own opinions.  The nice thing about the Twitter community is the niche websites that can tell you something about yourself (TweetPsych and Twittascope, for example).  I didn’t post my dream on Freud-It because I got my own blog for dissecting my dreams.

This dream was inspired by the Christmas Day terrorism incident where a wannabe terrorist tried to set off his underwear explosive on a plane arriving at Detroit.  (First the shoe bomber, now the undie bomber, and, since I have seen too much Tokyo splatter movies, the bra bomber will be next.)  The initial reports said firecrackers were lit on the plane.  I can imagine a string of Lady Fingers firecrackers being lit by some prankster.  When I was a little boy, my brother threw firecrackers at my bare feet to see me dance, and was soon in a world of hurt with our mother coming out the front door and a sheriff patrol car pulling up behind him.  (This was in the early 1970’s when the sheriff deputies would take people behind the local convenience store to beat out a confession and were regard as more dangerous than the Hell’s Angels living down the street.)  When I told my family about the plane incident, they immediately expressed the desire to toss the guy off the plane without a parachute.

I have never flown in a plane.  I have taken the Caltrain commuter train between San Jose and Mountain View, and the Amtrak train between San Jose and Sacramento.   When I took Amtrak to Sacramento, I would take my laptop with me for the 3.5 hour trip to either write or watch movies.  These days I travel light with a notepad and pen to write and my iPod Touch to watch movies.  When I had my dream, I had a manual typewriter.

Typewriters weren’t unusual for me.

I fell in love with an IBM Selectric typewriter when I was in the principal’s office at kindergarten, watching the little gray ball spin to put black letters on the paper.  (This was the meeting where my parents were informed that I was mentally retarded and I would spend many years confounding my special ed teachers by blowing out the evaluation tests at the college or genius level.)  Long before computers started showing up in the local stores, I was checking out the various models of typewriters.  I had a half-dozen typewriters when I was growing up and later gave them up when wordprocessing became practical in college.

After my mother died of breast cancer in 2004, I went through a period of reclaiming my childhood by possessing objects that would trigger positive childhood memories, like Lava Soap and Johnson’s Baby Shampoo.  When I decided to get serious about being a writer, I ordered a manual typewriter from Amazon.  My Dad thought I went off into the deep end when he asked what was in the box that we picked up at the post office.   But being the writer of my childhood meant having a typewriter.  I later got an electric typewriter that I still use to compose the rough drafts of my short stories and novels.

If you’re on a train with a manual typewriter, the repeated click-clack sound of the keys striking the ribbon to put ink on the paper could be mistaken for firecrackers and perhaps more annoying than a crying baby.  Today’s train conductors will not physically throw people off a train—moving or not—for fear of a liability lawsuit.  I was coming back from on Caltrain one Friday afternoon when a young couple were drunk like stunks and wanted to get naked to have sex on the train.  They didn’t get that far but they were crawling all over the seats and each other.  The train conductor called ahead at the San Jose downtown station to have the police waiting to arrest them and physically remove them from the train.  The train conductors of yesteryear wouldn’t hestiate to manhandle someone off a moving train into the wilderness or murder outright if that was necessary.

What does my dream mean?  Who knows.  Or, as the second rabbi explains in A Serious Man, “Who cares?”

On a related note, “The Red Book” by Carl Jung is becoming a surprise bestseller this holiday season.  Handmade and printed in Italy, the 416-page book weighs in at nine pounds and has a $195 sticker price (available for 37% of at Amazon).  This book of dream interpretations has been never been published until now.  What’s the difference between a Freudian and Jungian dream analysis?  I have no idea.  When I took psychology in college, I got an “A” for the course because I was interested in applying psychological principles to the user interface design of software.  I was never interested in what made people tick or why they loose their marbles.  Although as a fiction writer, I’m not above poaching a Freudian/Jungian metaphor for my own purposes.

Teabagging The Credit Card Companies

Over the last few months, I been getting notices from the credit card companies that they are planning to raise the interest rates on my three cards to 30% in 2010.  What made me see red was a patronizing paragraph on one notice that stated if I was a good little boy and made my payment on time for the next six months, they will drop my interest rate by one percent.  Last week I cut up my credit cards and sent them back with a request to close my accounts at the current interest rates.  This week I decided to teabag the credit card companies with my own notice that I’m restructuring my finances on terms beneficial to me.

NEW DEBT TERMS

Due to the fact that I been out of work since Friday, February 13, 2009, I have seen my savings dwindled and my debt payments increased.  The debt payments, in particular, has been annoying since the credit card companies are determined to make me pay for their mistakes during the GREAT RECESSION.

I had reorganized my finances to increase my savings and decrease my debt payments until such time I have a job and six months of living expenses in savings.  Then, and only then, will I resume regular debt payments to pay down my outstanding debts.

If my account isn’t already closed, please do so now.

Thank you for your cooperation.

My monthly payments for all three credit cards will now be $50 per month instead of $500 per month that I been paying for years.  The extra money will go towards paying for my car insurance, smog test, and vehicle registration that is due next month, and the taxes on unemployment benefits due in April.  Beyond that, everything goes straight into savings.  The key advantage of taking charge of my financial priorities is that I’m no longer being stressed out by how I’m going to pay my bills.  I’m dictacting the terms, not the credit card companies.

I still have a credit card for my writing business (which is still collecting rejection slips and contributor copies) and a personal loan with the bank that has my checking and savings account.  The bank haven’t tried to stiff me and I can’t stiff the bank without jeopardizing my rent check.  That’s the downside of having linked accounts at one financial institution.  These accounts will be on my priority list to pay down first.

The plan is to prepare for the next layoff that might come sooner rather than later.  I’ll continue living with my reduced budget when I get a new job to use the extra money to build up a six-month cash reserve and start paying down debt.  I expect the economy to have wobbly legs for the next few years and I need to protect myself against the possibility of not having any unemployment benefits during that time.  If I’m debt free the next time I do draw unemployment benefits, I’ll be able to put money into savings since I’ll be living within my means.  An important lesson I’m learning from the Great Recession.

My credit record will take a serious hit for the short term.  All kinds of spurious fees will be added on to the debts I owe.  I’ll get nasty letters and phone calls from the credit card companies, but that’s all they can do if I continue to make regular payments on the accounts.  If they force me into bankruptcy, they can get in line behind the bank.  If they repossess my car (which they won’t since the insurance, registration and smog test is more than the Kelly Blue Book value), my commute costs will quadruple for public transportation, limit my chances of getting a new job, and I’ll have no money at all.

In short, the credit card companies will have no choice.

When I read that charge cards requiring full payment each month are becoming popular again, I applied and was approved for a basic American Express charge card.  I’m planning to use the charge card for gas and vehicle-related emergencies.  This is the only area of my finances that I need a credit card for.  I also upgraded my AAA membership for the 100-mile coverage since I been looking for jobs outside of my typical 10-mile commute range.

Talking to my extended family on Christmas Day, I’m not alone in this outrageous behavior by the credit card companies.  Everyone else had to cut up their credit cards.  My Dad in particular was angry about the percentage spread between interest being paid for savings and being charged for credit cards.  My niece was more explicit about getting a phone call on Christmas Eve: “Eat [expletive] and die!” We have all seen our rates jacked up, our credit limits hacked down, and suffered the snotty attitudes from the credit card companies.

For the record, the definition of teabagging that I’m using is: “The act of protesting certain fiscal policies[.]” Credit card companies are determined to maximize short-term profits by any means possible, including destroying relationships with their best customers.  Teabagging also refers to a certain sexual position.  (Remember that when a politician proudly announced being supported by the teabaggers.)  That’s what Wall Street and the financial industry are doing to their customers and the taxpayers, expecting everyone to respond like Oliver Twist by saying: “Please, sir, can I have some more?”

Not anymore.

 

Merry Christmas 2009

One of my all time favorite Christmas songs is “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer” by Dr. Elmo that came out in the early 1980’s, which became popular on the country radio stations before breaking out into the mainstream.

My mother hated that song because she believed that everyone thought the song was about her.  We told her that wasn’t true.  If the song was about grandma drinking too much beer, that would’ve been a different story.  Rarely did my mother drink the eggnog that was spiked with either brandy or rum.  Merry Christmas!

OUAA Website Changes – December 2009

I mentioned last month about redoing this website over the New Year’s weekend.  Out of a pique of boredom last weekend, I redid the entire website using the Default template from JoomlaPraise.  Having recently redone my author and business websites, doing one more website wasn’t that difficult.  After finalizing all the changes and chasing down all the annoying details today, the redone website is now up.

There are probably some broken links lurking about.  Those will be taken care of later when I review the existing content.  Adding legacy content between Christmas and New Year’s Day is next on the agenda.  I have 100+ items from the last 12 years that need to be converted over.  Check the change log to see what is being added.

I’m planning to resume regular blogging this week.  With all the programming, website redesigns, and writing that I been doing for the last three months, I haven’t had much enthusiasm to be blogging two or three times a week.  The New Year will not be any less challenging.  If everything goes to plan, I’ll be shopping around my first novel (two volumes) and two short story collections, and finishing the rough draft of my second novel.  The rhythm of working on longer projects should make blogging easy.

 

The Divorce Ban Initiative Continues

I’d earlier blogged about the California Divorce Ban Initiative that’s being qualified for the 2010 state ballot.  This turns out to be a satire on the absurdness of the initiative process.  (Then again, maybe not.)  The group behind the 2010 California Marriage Protection Act had put out a video.

Your reaction to this may be laughter, cheering or crying.  I find this funny from the perspective of an anarchist throwing a Motolov cocktail or two into the California political process.  I’m deeply intrigued by how this would play out and will vote to accept the consequences of a ban going into effect.  California is still America’s future according to a recent cover story by Time Magazine.  Think about that but not too hard.  Your head might explode.

The California Divorce Ban Initiative

Noticed in the Los Angeles Times that California Secretary of State Debra Bowen has authorized a divorce ban initiative to gather signatures to qualify for the 2010 ballot.  California is often regarded as the social laboratory for the rest of the country: movie star governors, the anti-tax revolt, a dysfunctional state government with a budget process teetering on bankruptcy,  pro- and anti-[insert hot button social issue here], and whatever else that can qualify for the ballot.   If California got something going, the rest of country will get it too like a bad case of swine flu.

Marriage used to be considered a serious commitment that wasn’t to be taken lightly since dissolving the marriage happened under three common scenarios: legally invalid (i.e., underage without parental consent), adultery, or death of a spouse.  If you made a bad decision when you got married, you had to live with the consequences of your actions.  Short of murder, faking your own death, or joining the French Foreign Legion, you were so out of luck.

Then the divorce laws were liberalized to include “no fault” or “irreconcilable differences,” and the divorce rate shoot up so that nearly half of all marriages ended up in divorce.  What used to be a shameful secret in society is now widely accepted. Celebrities getting married and divorced—sometimes in less than a day—is routine coverage for the paparazzi crowd.  The Republicans nomineeshad more divorces than the Democrats nominees in the 2008 presidential campaign.  With prenuptial agreements, you can even plan for a divorce if that should ever happen.

Now there is an initiative in California to change it back to the way it used to be.  Maybe this will be the initiative to force a change in the initative process.  Or maybe the status quo won’t change at all.

What’s even more interesting that no one else in the media had picked up on the story.  Probably because the initiative is in the signature gathering stage, and not all initiatives qualify for the ballot.   No sense for the media to focus on an initiative that might go nowhere.  But I’m fascinated by all the questions if the divorce ban is enacted into law and survives a constitutional court challenge.

Will people rush to get a divorce before the amendment was enacted the same way people declared bankruptcy before the new bankruptcy law in 2005 went into effect?

Will the legal profession try to challenge the constitutional amendment to protect their divorce and child support practices?

Will social and religious conservatives find themselves dancing around the issue because divorce rates are higher among the “family values” crowd?

Will the divorce ban apply to gay marriages (once all the legal challenges are cleared)?

Will the homicide rate among spouses increase dramatically?

Will Las Vegas become the key destination to get married and divorced?

Will people leave California to move to a state with liberal divorce laws?

Will the other states enact their own divorce bans?

Will this be the beginning of the end of an uncivil society?

Personally, I might put my signature down and even vote for this initiative.  Not because I have a strong position against divorce, either legally or morally.   But, like an anarchist holding Molotov cocktail at a store front, I want to see the impact of this initiative on society.  California can’t get any more screwed up than it is now—or can it?

FTC Disclosure: My parents were married for 47 years until breast cancer took my mother in 2004, although I might have benefited if their attempt for a divorce in the late 1970’s had actually succeeded.  I have no financial connections with the backers of this ballot initiative, and, beyond a possible signature and a vote, have no intention of actively supporting them otherwise.

 

Tempest In A FTC Teapot

The blogging community got stirred into a tempest this week with the announcement that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will updated the Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials to apply to bloggers on December 1, 2009.  If a blogger writes a book review, has a Amazon or Google paid advertising link for the book, and doesn’t properly disclose the source of the product (i.e., bought at store or given free by publisher), the FTC could fine the blogger $11,000 USD for each violation.  There’s a still lot of confusion about how the FTC will enforce the guidelines among the gazillion blogs out there on the Internet.  (According to this article, the guidelines don’t apply to “bedroom” bloggers.)  Most bloggers—including me—see nothing but a big headache with these guidelines which haven’t been updated since 1980.

You remember what 1980 was all about?  That’s when the big three TV networks ruled American broadcast news, the MTV generationof cable TV didn’t exist yet, newspapers were alive and well and being delivered by the neighborhood kids, the Internet was still with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and required a university account to access, the most popular home computer was an Apple II and the IBM PC haven’t been introduced yet, a nuclear holocaust of from the Cold War could happen at any moment, andthe peanut farmer from Georgia got voted out to be replaced with the cowboy actor from California in the White House.  Flash forward a generation, the whole world is a different place.

Based on my initial reading of the guidelines, my situation is more or less clear cut.

I’m going to remove all the paid Amazon links and advertising from my reviews and websites.  I been planning to do this for a while since I only made five bucks in the last five years from Amazon.   (Ironically, I only made $3.02 over the last four years from writing.)  With the ongoing Great Recession, I have a simple financial rule: if something costs me money, a pain in the butt, and/or, now, doesn’t make me money, it has to go.  My life has been greatly simplified by this rule over the past year.  Being fined by the FTC would cost me some change and be a pain in the butt.

This isn’t Amazon’s fault.  I never seriously tried to make money with my websites or driven the kind of traffic that would enthusiastically click on every Amazon link I posted.  I wrote reviews because I enjoyed reading the book or watching the DVD, wanted to share my experience while honing my non-fiction writing skills, and, if someone clicked on a link and brought something, I would get a small percentage of the sale in return.  Now that I’m in the final year of establishing myself as a writer, I’m focusing on the business side of making money as a writer.  For the immediate future, it would be better for me to strip out all the advertising until I come up with a marketing plan that makes sense for me as a writer, my websites, and my ever adoring audience.

The other thing is I will have to update each individual review article and blog post with a disclosure statement that every item I had reviewed to date has been paid for out of my own money.  A blanket statement apparently won’t do, which is stupid considering that I had paid for everything.  If I had gotten a book, DVD or movie ticket for free, I would have disclosured the source of the product anyway.

When I revamp my business website (which used to be my author website), I’m going to stick my post office address on the front page.   Apparently, there are some bloggers who are getting truckloads of free stuff mailed to them.  I’m definitely missing out on something here.  The only freebie I got this year was a copy of a magazine from a publisher that sat on two of my short story submissions—which, due to an oversight on my part, were both the same short story—without responding for a year while sacking the editorial staff.  I’m open to receiving any books concerning science fiction, fantasy, young adults (no hormonal vampires, please), and programming languages, DVDs, movie tickets, and any product from Apple.  No review unless a check is attached since my time is valuable and writing reviews take time.

The new FTC guidelines can be summed up in the eternal words of the penguins from Madagascar upon reaching the Antarctica: “Well, this sucks!”

[Disclosure: No company mentioned in this blog post has compensated me in any shape or form for mentioning or linking their services and/or product.  If the FTC doesn’t like this disclosure, I’ll pay the fine for each violation in 1,100,000 pennies like a good American.]


 

Figuring Out Pandorum

When my friend and I arrived to see “Pandorum” at the Century 24 last week, the parking lot was empty.  This is the place where bad movies open to die an unwatched death.  For a science fiction movie, good or bad, this wasn’t a bad situation.  We were horrified to find a bevy of pre-teen girls moving through the concession stand, wondering if “Pandorum” appealed to the teeny-bopper set of”Twilight” and we should return our tickets.  We were relieved see them go into the theater playing “Fame,” a re-make of the classic 1980’s TV/movie/play/whatever since Hollywood can’t think of anything more original.  Unlike “Jennifer’s Body” the week before, no one was talking behind us since there were fewer people watching.   We had one question that was left unanswered by the trailer thatwe first saw at WonderCon 2009.

Was “Pandorum” more like “Alien” (an alien creature) or “Event Horizon” (a demon-possessed spaceship)?

The bridge crew of the Elsym receives the final transmission from a dying Earth that they are now the last survivors of humanity.  Later on, two crew officers, Bower (Ben Foster) and Payton (Dennis Quaid), are awaken from hyper-sleep.  They have functional memories for operating the various subsystems of the ship that comes back to them sooner than their personal memories of who they are as individuals.  They discover that they’re locked inside their compartment, unable to raise the bridge crew on the radio, and a periodic power surge is slowly destroying the ship.  Bower goes into the ventilation system to bypass the locked door to find out what is going on with the ship and reset the nuclear reactor before it shuts down forever.  Payton monitors Bower’s progress via radio and tries to find a way to unlock the door to the bridge.

Bower comes across the pale-skinned creatures that are roaming around the ship, hunting down and eating any survivors they can find.   Are these space vampire or space zombies?  Neither.  They appear to be space cannibals who violently eat humans—or each other—into shreds.  Bower discovers two other crew members, Nadia (Antje Traue) and Manh (Cung Le), who had eked out a marginal existence of staying alive while avoiding the creatures.  Together they travel towards the nuclear reactor.  When they come across another survivor in a bolt hole, he recites how one member of the bridge crew reacted violently to Earth’s last transmission, taking on a Messiah complex, and exiling the other crew members into the ship, referring to the elaborately carved images into the metal panels like cave paintings that resembles the exile of humanity from Eden.  Of course, the survivor telling them the story posioned their water so he could have them stay for dinner as his dinner.  They convinced him that they would be his last dinner if the nuclear reactor shuts down to kill everyone aboard the ship.

Payton, meanwhile, discovers a crew member crawling in the ventilation shaft, Gallo (Cam Gigandet of “Twilight”), who was on the bridge when the last transmission from Earth came in.  Pandorum, as Payton explained to Bower earlier, is a psychological condition that sometimes effect crew members in deep space, introducing paranoia and homicidal rages.   The first ship sent to the Earth-like planet failed because a sick crew member took over the ship and jettisoned the hyper-sleep pods of 60,000 people into deep space.  When Payton confronts Gallo about what really happened to the ship, the Pandorum madness spirals out of control in a fight to the death.   Meanwhile, Bower resets the nuclear reactor with minutes to spare and comes under the influence of Pandorum when reaching the bridge.

The ending has several twists, some obvious and some obscure.  The most significant can easily be missed when the camera crosses over the mission time clock—924 years from launch—that explains the evolution of the cannibals from the exiled crew.  When the doors over the bridge windows are opened to reveal a dark void, the distinctive lifeforms swimming outside explains where the ship had landed.  Although Pandorum the disease nearly killed the mission again, the ship itself had completed the mission to bring humanity to a new planet.  Only 1,200 some odd survivors are left to restart humanity.

Cannibals in space is a subject rarely touched in science fiction. The closest example I can think of are the Reavers from the TV series,“Firefly,” who haunt the space ways looking for flesh to consume and decorate the outside of their ships with skeletons.  The only other science fiction series where the crew evolved was the TV series, “Red Dwarf,” where Cat is the humanoid descendent of a pregnant domesticated cat during the three million years sealed in the ship cargo hold.  This makes “Pandorum” a rather curious blend for a science fiction movie, less like “Alien” and “Event Horizon” in many ways.

Updated – Sunday, 20 March 2011: A newer blog post about Pandorum can be found here.