Too much horror business, flying deep in space

Pandorum is a surprisingly not bad sci-fi movie experience. I am always leery of deep space missions gone wrong scifi/horror movies, thanks to Event Horizon. Renting that movie is the cinematic equivalent of letting someone sleep over at your house and finding out they shat the bed. What's more, same dude directed both movies!

Anyway, this one is fun. A couple dudes wake up on a ship with the last humans in the galaxy only to find the ship is overrun by evil bipeds with a taste for human flesh. It's basically a chase film for the first 3/4 as one of the survivors works his way to the reactor to get the ship moving on to its destination.

The baddies are well used. You see them mostly via strobe like effects and they act like a combination of the wicked monkey of Indiana Jones and Jet Li. The pace of the movie, with its constant running and fighting, does a nice job of spacing out the question of what really happened.

This got me thinking about science fiction books about generation ships. These are the great arks that some think humanity will use to colonize other worlds, or to escape a dying Earth. My absolute favorite of the genre is Ship of Fools, a book, like those of Maria Doria Russell that manages to blend questions of faith into a science fiction base. The genre is fun as you get the paranoia of noir, the science of hard scifi and usually a bit of the old ass kicking. The movie gives you a little of each.