Hollywood's Satanic Agenda (18): Pandorum

This being a recent film, we are obligated to warn of SPOILERS AHEAD.

How many recent films can you think of that make references to Noah's ark? How about The Day The Earth Stood Still, Iron Man, 2012, and Knowing; all of these have "ark" methods to preserve a remnant of humanity against TEOTWAWKI catastrophe. And 2009's Pandorum is another. If one accepts that a large part of that which comes out of Hollywood is propaganda, then one needs to consider why the persistent ark theme? This we'll discuss at the end of this report.

Pandorum refers to a schizophrenia-like condition producing paranoia and hallucinations brought on by mental trauma. This condition is an allusion to the recently popularized notion of God being schizophrenic because he loves his children yet punishes them. If this is the case, then most parents are schizophrenic. As we'll find, the character with pandorum is the one representing God in the film.


The film, sort of a cross between I Am Legend and Alien, takes place aboard a spacecraft. The title of the ship is Elysium; in Greek mythology, this was the underworld and the final resting place of "blameless" heroes.


Aboard the ship, we are introduced to our first character, Bower, who abruptly comes out of hyper-sleep. What we see is not only an awakening process, but a rebirth as well considering the umbilical-like tubes inside the womb-like hyper-bunk.


The next awakening/rebirth is Lieutenant Payton, the ranking member of the two.

The name Payton is said to derive from Paega's town, or warrior's town. Paega's town is also the supposed root of pagan. This fits with the schizophrenic god theme as a common view of the Biblical God these days is that Yahweh is some sort of amalgamation of various tribal deities and beliefs, Jesus is Horus, and suchlike.

Ergo, this underworld hell, Hades, is the town, or creation, of this god figure, Payton. It is the isolated, material prison of the demiurge: the bad god masquerading as the good one. His rank, lieutenant, means substitute, to take the place of--this meaning comes into play when we find out who Payton really is.

Bower is the "bow-er," or one who bows; and as a corporal (corpus, body) he represents mankind, or one of us.


The two separate quickly, with Bower setting out to explore the ship and Payton remaining in the control room. They communicate via radio, lending Payton a "voice of God" trait as he guides Bower through the ship/Hades.

Bower soon finds that this ship is terrorized by some sort of creatures. This ship is a hell, and like Alien, the crew-members find themselves having awakened into a nightmare.


Bower soon finds other survivors and we get a little back story: due to the overpopulation of Earth (yawn), the Elysium was dispatched on a settlement mission to an Earth-like planet named Tanis.


The character Nadia, part of the genetics team, tells us this ship "truly is Noah's ark. This archive holds the world we are going to live in."

Tanis is a city in Egypt where, in the film Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Biblical Ark of the Covenant was located. And as we'll soon find, this ark, the Elysium, is actually located on Tanis now. The significance of this is that they are on the new world, they just don't know it yet. They have to kill God first to become enlightened to this fact.


Payton also meets another crew-member: Corporal Gallo.


We also find that our god-figure is now lighted in blue; this, probably intended as a hint that Payton was hallucinating, can be viewed as an unconscious allusion to Payton's divine role, the blue god, like Krishna, one of the "god archetypes"--meaning that the religions of each era are merely man-made reinventions of previous tribal fables.


Bower and his group then meet up with another survivor, who tries to eat them. Here we get two sides telling the same story from different perspectives.


Earth has been destroyed, the people aboard the Elysium ark are now the only hope for the continuation of humanity. During the 123 year trip to Tanis, there are three crew-members awake on a shift.

A message is sent from Earth, then the ship's display shows that Earth is no longer there. This trauma causes one of the three to develop "pandorum" and kill the other two crew-members. The lone crew member then goes about doing as he pleases with the passengers--playing God. We hear that he was "both God and the devil...master of his own vessel." He eventually got bored and put himself back into hyper-sleep.


Then the Payton/Gallo situation soon turns hostile. We get the familiar mirror-image/split personality shot, then the shattering of the mind reference.


Payton and Gallo begin fighting, then we learn that Payton is Corporal Gallo, the schizophrenic god of the ship. He has turned on himself.


When Bower and his group return to the bridge where Payton now is, they find that they have been in hyper-sleep far longer than they thought--almost a thousand years. They are actually under water in an ocean located on Tanis.

The monsters are passengers who have evolved to the environment of the ship thanks to medication designed to help them adapt to Tanis. Evolution is a major theme in the film, survival of the fittest, which assumes, of course, that there is no God; and as Payton/Gallo tells Bower, "God is dead with the rest of humanity," as though He were merely a construct of the tribe.

At this point we reach the film's climax, the point at which the audience's attention is most focused, and we get the obligatory old world/new world references with some muddled New Age blathering, the heart of which is pandorum, which, as Payton informs, is not what we/they were led to believe, it's actually more like enlightenment.

Payton/Gallo: "You have to let go of your petty concept of reality; that's just baggage from the old world, and we both know that didn't work out very well."

"This ship is a seed from which we can create a new world." This one seemed obvious from the get-go, but as Payton is now informing Bower of it, we have to assume there are two "new worlds" on the table.

"I am offering you the kingdom!" Though it's not clear as to what this "kingdom" is, this one is interesting as an allusion to Matthew 4:

"Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; And saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me."

Here the devil tempted Jesus; likewise, in the film, the god/devil tempts the bow-er. Previously, the viewer thought Payton was a good guy, but we learn that he is really a bad guy, a mentally ill murderer. And he's not even a lieutenant, he's merely a corporal, just like the rest of us.


A struggle causes a hull breach, bringing in the oceans of Tanis into the underworld ship. Ironically, The ark that saved Noah from the rain/flood is now being flooded and will kill the god-figure.


Bower and Nadia enter a hyper-sleep pod to escape.


The hull breach causes an escape activation of the remaining pods.


Bower and Nadia find themselves on the new world. Soon the others surface. Killing the god-figure caused their release from the underworld and the realization of the new world.


In the end we read : Tanis Year One, Population 1213.

1213, in bar code speak (universal product code) is 8, the number of new beginnings, or resurrection.

Numerous film critics bemoaned the film's lack of originality and it didn't even break even in theaters, but what about this ark subtext that we keep seeing repeated in recent years? Obviously, not everyone is intended to "board" the ark, whatever it is, prior to the TEOTWAWKI catastrophe, it will only be the chosen ones, or elite.


This, we would suggest, is the purpose of this ark propaganda: to prepare people for some inevitable end of the world catastrophe and to accept the idea of a special few who will be chosen to carry on the human race--this acceptance is essential: most people will placidly resign themselves to the whatever fate is assigned to them by the talking heads on TV while people deemed more important than they are kept safe.

This remnant will take refuge, probably not on spacecraft or big boats (as in 2012), but more than likely in D.U.M.B.s--deep underground military bases. More of a Deep Impact scenario rather than 2012 or Pandorum, hence the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway. We are also keenly aware that this Deep Impact scenario functions equally as a metaphor; peak oil, for example:

"When oil is gone, civilization will be stupendously different. The onset of rapid depletion will trigger convulsions on a global scale, including, likely, global pandemics and die-offs of significant portions of the world's human population. The "have" countries will face the necessity kicking the "have-nots" out of the global lifeboat in order to assure their own survival. Even before such conditions are reached, inelastic supply interacting with inelastic demand will drive the price of oil and oil-derived commodities through the stratosphere, effecting by market forces alone massive shifts in the current distribution of global wealth."


What this catastrophe could be we'll let the reader ponder. We already know they want the population reduced to well under a billion, and what better way to do that than to engineer some gigantic "natural" disaster for which for which no one can be blamed; then everyone says "oh, well" and either hugs loved ones on the porch just before dying, gets drunk, has a party at the beach high fiving their bros, or whatever--just like in the movies.