Director/Photography – Noah Luke, Screenplay – Rolfe Kanefsky & Joe Roche, Producer – David Michael Latt, Music – Mikel Shane Prather, Visual Effects Supervisor – Glenn Campbell, Production Design – Paul Bianchi. Production Company – The Asylum.
Cast
Natalie Storrs (Dr Jennifer Ryan), Tom Sizemore (Commander Hank Lewis), Mark Andrew Ricketson (Dr Cliff Ryan), Kristos Andrews (Gregory Black), Michael Scovotti (Colonel William Brady), Plastic Martyr (Wanda Smith), Jhey Castles (Administrator Doreen Harris), Drew Anthony (Randolph Perkins), Azeem Vecchio (Markus Richards), Nadja Sofi (Sophie Valdez), Becca Buckalew (Allie Craven), Richard Chiu (Kyle Vidman)
Plot
Communications with the Cassini 3 mission to explore Saturn’s moon Pandora has gone dead. Husband and wife scientists Mark and Jennifer Ryan are recruited by NASA to join a mission aboard the Luna-One commanded by Hank Lewis that will travel through a wormhole to Pandora. Landing, the team discover Cassini’s commander Gregory Black and one of his crew still alive. They are then attacked by the water on the moon. Back aboard the lander, it is determined that the water is inhabited by a parasite that acts as a hive mind and can possess the human body. In desperation they try to find solutions to drive the water out so that they can dock with Luna-One and not carry the infection back to Earth, all before the wormhole closes.
Since the early 2000s, the low-budget US production company The Asylum has been known for their output of Mockbusters – films that come out with titles intended to mimic those of big-budget releases in the hope that people will mistake them or not look too closely. In between these, they essentially created the Gonzo Killer Shark film, as popularised by their bad movie hit Sharknado (2013), and have made an assortment of monster films and disaster movies.
In this case, Battle for Pandora was construed as a mockbuster take on James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water (2022). As with The Asylum’s releasing strategy, Battle for Pandora went out four days before The Way of Water appeared in theatres. In this case, The Asylum were ingeniously able to make a film that blatantly uses the same name as the planet in Cameron’s film by setting the film on Pandora, which is one of Saturn’s moons – the script even ups Cameron one and has sections of dialogue explaining who Pandora was in Greek mythology.
The early sections of the film with the launch of the mission and exploring Pandora are uninteresting. On the other hand, the latter two-thirds of the film develop out into a Body Snatchers story. The majority of this is contained within a medical bay about the size of the average living room. These scenes are interspersed with cutaways back to Tom Sizemore in command of the mothership in orbit refusing to allow them to return. While the containment to the medbay does make the action seem cramped, these sections develop a certain locked-in tension with the survivors trying to deal with those who have been infected by the alien water.
Attack by alien possessed water on Pandora
These scenes are when scriptwriter Joe Roche comes into play. Roche is The Asylum’s resident mad scientist and author of scripts for Collision Earth (2020), Meteor Moon (2020), Alien Conquest (2021), Devil’s Triangle (2021), Planet Dune (2021), Robotapocalypse (2021), 4 Horsemen: Apocalypse (2022), Moon Crash (2022), Methgator (2023), Doomsday Meteor (2023), Transmorphers: Mech Beasts (2023), Continental Split (2024) and Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs (2025).
As usual, Joe Roche has considerable fun devising ingenious almost believable technical solutions to dealing with the alien-infected water – the crew coating the hull and their bodies with oil and moisturiser, trying to alter their PH levels or heat up their bodies, before eventually arriving at the realisation that altering the salinity content of the water will kill off the parasite. The surroundings feel far too cramped to do any of this justice but there is an undeniable ingenuity to the musings. Not to mention that Natalie Storrs plays with a conviction as though she believes every word of it.
Apparently Roche wasn’t around or slipped up when it came to the parts where the wormhole located within the Solar System is described as being surrounded by nebulae. I also had some difficulty of the depiction of the moon. The real Pandora moon is only 64×49 miles in size. The external shots we see of the moon here make it look like a desolate rock, which somewhat resembles the Pandora from astronomical photos. However, when we are on the surface, it appears to have rivers and plantlife, which indicate an atmosphere, something that would be impossible on a planetary body as small as the real Pandora.
Noah Luke had previously worked for The Asylum as a cinematographer. He made his directorial debut with Jungle Run (2021) and went on to direct Attack on Titan (2022), Moon Crash (2022), Thor: God of Thunder (2022) and Doomsday Meteor (2023) for them.
