Powerful

Boring

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Behold the 'Alien/Aliens' rip offs. They were big in Italy in the 80s and some were actually worth watching as they were different takes on the classic story. Even worse they all had the same title, 'Alien 2.' (not kidding, there were several Italian films with this title) The worst by far was the one taking place in the Venice sewers where Italians dressed like Sigourney Weaver, Michael Biehn, and Bill Paxton, used pump shotguns which did not actually fire anything, eject shells, or even produce muzzle flare at NOTHING! Footage of cheap puppets was added later.'Pandora Machine' makes the above film look like 'Citizen Kane!' 'Pandora Machine is as bad as it gets! Take refugees from a scifi convention with air soft guns, filming with a camcorder in their parents' basement.Much like the cheap pump shotguns which fired nothing, ejected no shells, and produced no muzzle flare, these kids' air soft guns also do NOTHING! They're not even real looking guns! The dialogue is truly as bad as it gets. "I'll shove this gun up your fxxx hole!" Get ready for 90 minutes of that.Other scenes which show just how juvenile these film makers are is a gratuitous out of place girl on girl kiss.Clearly this whole film is merely the result of kids with air soft guns, a camcorder, and a free weekend while their parents' were out of town.

Roger Ebert once said that the star system for rating movies is a sliding scale. To give this movie high marks doesn't mean that it's almost as good as "Silence of the Lambs" or "Star Wars", or even "Bladerunner" (which it resembles slightly). It's not nearly as good as any of those movies. I give it high marks because compared to other low budget (very, very low-budget) sci-fi movies, it's totally watchable, silly in a fun way, and just a little bit smarter than much of the genre in the way it deals with the question of the nature of sentient life. It's even slightly moving in a couple of scenes. Daryl Boling is a fine actor, and writer/director Andrew Bellware is an enthusiastic digital-age Ed Wood, without an allowance or an editor. One of the pleasures of watching this movie is seeing what someone can create without spending any money at all on production. Seriously, haven't you ever wished you could go out and make a feature-length movie yourself, with real actors? In this day of digital technology, who needs a studio, right? Well, here's an example of someone who did it, and all things considered, did it pretty well. Also, there is a tremendous amount of gratuitous nudity. No character wears clothing unless the plot absolutely requires it. I've rented other cheap sci-fi movies at Blockbuster, and they didn't contain ANY nudity.If you get your hands on this DVD, you must watch the bonus commentary track. It's very funny.

Another dystopian future, in which corrupt privatized police snoop everywhere and surveillance is universal. But a series of murders begin in which the surveillance technology doesn't work; the murderer/s don't seem to be human. The main character's most emotional relationship is with a holo-video of his departed wife. The intended effect seems to be Dickian (as in Philip K. Dick) paranoid moodiness, intensified by many of the scenes taking place through set surveillance cams; this certainly saved a lot of money by enabling stock shots to be used over and over again and gave the production a "techno" feel which can get a bit wearying, not unlike techno music. That being said, the whole is a competent student effort--very derivative, like all student efforts, but I would like to see more from these people.

Sometimes a student film really reaches out and grabs you. The Clerks is probably the most famous; Cube is the only such sci-fi movie I can think of. This movie really fails in many different ways. Although the two main actors are OK, the over-use of bad special effects is grating.Every several minutes the movie shows the same 6 or 7 still pictures of factories that look like the cover of Pink Floyd albums. One gets the impression that the director got really excited reading a book about semiotics in film and wanted to inject some warmed over Tarkovsky to make up for the lack of interesting, futuristic scenes.Indy films are supposed to be about crazy maverick stuff, but the corporate dystopia theme is poorly rehashed in this movie. The theme of a mismanaged, corrupt private police force was first explored in Verhoven's Robocop. Much of the silly dialogue in Pandora Machine is designed to re-enforce the impression that greedy corporations would run a dedicated police force into the ground; there's this painful scene where a woman at the police station is giving a performance review in which she criticizes the protagonists for their cost over-runs. You feel like telling the movie, 'ok, we get it, big business is evil,' but it never lets up.My girlfriend thought the acting was so bad that she called it 'a porn movie without the porn.' There's one rather erotic scene where a programmed woman rides the main character, but she looks to be in her late 20's or older. There is way too little erotica to vindicate this film's abysmal dialogue and painful-to-watch Commodore 64 graphics. I could only watch about 20 minutes at a time and eventually gave up on it after an hour.