I'm Alex Kirby and welcome to another outing of Press X. This time around we are diving back into the stealthy night-vision goggled confines of the Splinter Cell franchise for the second time. Here, we don’t just ask if the latest video game adaptation is faithful — we ask if it levels up, glitches out, or just needs a hard reset.
Pandora Tomorrow is the 2nd in both the film and game franchise. Ubisoft realizes they had a hit on their hands after the first game and published a game that was even better than the first. Pandora Tomorrow landed on the Xbox in 2004, strangely enough a side-scrolling Gameboy Advanced port was available long before Playstation or GameCube got one. And like most Ubisoft games, if you learn how to play one, each game will play primarily the same. Thats not a knock, its just knowing when to fix what isnt broken. Pandora Tomorrow was still strongly a stealth game, it did fix a lot of what was wrong in the first game: checkpoints that wont make you restart the entire mission, more gadgets, more flexible level design. Sam Fischer could make tiny mistakes that wouldnt wreck the whole mission. The first Splinter Cell walked strictly in the shadows so Pandora Tomorrow could lightly cough without having to abort the entire operation.
The film adaptation largely follows the plot of the video game, much like the first film did. And the primary cast reprised their roles, but the big change here was the production crew. Doug Liman seemed to only be interested in the first film adaptation, so Joe Carnahan was chosen to direct Pandora Tomorrow. D.R. Cobb on the other hand, returned to pen the film.
When a rogue militia leader seizes a U.S. embassy in East Timor and threatens to unleash a smallpox-based bioweapon across America, covert operative Sam Fisher is sent on a globe-spanning mission to uncover the source of the plot. His investigation leads him from Paris labs to Jerusalem back-alleys and Indonesian jungle camps, uncovering a conspiracy involving a missing CIA agent, a network of mercenaries, and a chilling fail-safe known as Pandora Tomorrow. As Fisher races to track down the final virus container before it detonates at LAX, he’s forced to navigate shifting alliances, political landmines, and betrayals on both sides of the intelligence world to stop a catastrophe engineered from inside his own country.
It sounds like an exciting spy thriller, but when you see it, it feels like it takes a long time to get to the great parts. Characters come and go and we never hear from them again, it jumps off the walls like a toddler high on red bull. I found myself nodding off a bit too much too. I did enjoy the first film, but this one collapsed under the weight of Joe Carnahan's ambitions to give us something that had a bigger budget than the last film. Didn't seem like he knew where to start or go with it, so he just wanted to throw everything in there. Tom Cruise still did a fine job with Sam Fisher, but I feel like he may have said something behind the scenes that made sure Joe didnt touch another Splinter Cell movie after this because this was Joe's only film in the franchise.
Despite the critics going hard on this one, the audience showed up even more for this one. It just barely scratched the worldwide billion dollar mark at 988M against a 200M budget and made a profit of 577M. Compared to the first Splinter Cell: 170M budget, combined worldwide box office of 893M with a profit of 559M.
Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow elevated the franchise with tighter stealth and smarter design, but the film adaptation sacrificed clever espionage for blockbuster excess, turning what could have been a taut spy story into a frenetic, if occasionally entertaining, spectacle.
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