Allegory
According to the bonus content on the DVD, Christian Alvart had claimed that he approached the film as an allegory for human life on Earth. The ship is addressed as its own world twice in the film, especially in its backstory, as told by Eddie Rouse's character, which is spoken with a strong mythological tone that involved the presence of a god/devil-like figure responsible for the "evils" in that world and the degradation of the human condition, somewhat similar to the stories in the poems Works and Days and Paradise Lost. The film's title also appears to be derived from two names that are present in the poems, Pandora and Pandæmonium.
Another mythological reference is the name of the ship, Elysium, which was the resting place for heroes in classical mythology that bordered the River Lethe, the part of the underworld where the memories of "earthly lives" were erased so that souls could be reincarnated – similar to the way that the characters on board the Elysium have little memory of their lives on Earth; they are even referred to as "heroes". Another reference to the underworld is the Hunter lair that Leland calls "Hell itself", which resembles The Third Circle of Hell that Dante Alighieri crossed during his journey through Hell into the "Earthly Paradise" in The Divine Comedy. Additionally, the poem also mentions Elysium, features a man(Dante) looking for his lost love, who encounters people swimming in blood, and the Devil himself.
Read more about this topic: Pandorum, Production
Famous quotes containing the word allegory:
“A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame; while allegory is one of many possible representations of an embodied thing, or familiar principle, and belongs to fancy and not to imagination: the one is a revelation, the other an amusement.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)