In Pandorum, opening this Friday, Quaid plays Payton, one of two space travelers who awake from hypersleep aboard a massive spaceship. (The other one is Bower, played by Ben Foster.) Hypersleep always leaves travelers with total amnesia, so Payton and Bower don't know who they are. Normally, there's supposed to be someone there to help reorient you when you reawaken from hypersleep, but they're on their own. And they're locked in the tiny room they wake up in. The first part of the movie is about their struggle to escape from this room — but once they finally get out, "that's when all hell breaks loose," says Quaid.

Are we ready for the return of space horror? "I sure enough do hope so," says Quaid. "If you have a good story — and this is a great story — a good movie, a fun, exciting movie, the audience will show up." He says Pandorum is "pretty amazing, in that it's part thriller, part horror movie, I guess... it's a myth, asking who are we? Are we who we think we are?"

And even though you've seen weird white creatures attacking our heroes out of the bowels of the spaceship in the trailers and clips, there aren't any aliens in this movie, says Quaid. "The aliens are us."

In the clips we've seen so far, Quaid's character seems like the steady voice of reason, compared with Foster's jumpy, paranoid character. But "that's only what it seems like," says Quaid. "My character is hiding something that even he himself doesn't know." Besides that, all Quaid will say about Payton is, "He's not who he thinks he is, let's put it that way."

He had fun playing off of Foster's jumpy, paranoid character, but also has some "pretty interesting" repartee with Cam Gigandet, who plays Gallo.

Quaid has heard the inevitable comparisons with District 9, what with humans peeling off their own skin and slowly turning into some kind of inhuman creature, but "this is a very different type of story." The film's title, Pandorum, "actually refers to a syndrome that occurs with prolonged space flight, where one begins to lose their grip on reality."

Quaid also appears in the upcoming Biblical horror film Legion, in which people have boils bursting out of their skin, among other things. We asked him which movie was grosser to film, and he said "I think they're about even." He says special effects are much easier to shoot than they used to be — in the old days, they were all mechanical, and now "they basically just build the whole thing around you."

Enemy Mine is one of our favorite films, so we had to ask Quaid about it — many accounts say the space epic was filmed twice, in its entirety. The studio fired original director Richard Loncraine, and director Wolfgang Petersen started over from scratch. But Quaid tells us they didn't quite get to film the entire movie before Loncraine was fired:

We didn't film it completely twice. We shot in Iceland with another director, for about four to six weeks, something like that. [It was] a very different concept of the film, and then the director was fired. And we shot in Germany with Wolfgang Petersen.

Nobody's ever seen the footage that Loncraine shot, and it's rumored to have been junked. But Quaid says it still exists somewhere, "but I'd like to see it myself." Quaid Loncraine's original version of Mine was "grittier," at least partly because it was filmed on location, with real weather, and Petersen shot his version on a soundstage. "It had a grittiness to it." But it was still the same basic story of a human and an alien, enemies in a bitter war, learning to become friends.

And finally, we asked Quaid if he's still on board for G.I. Joe 2. And he says, "Yeah if they do one, i'm there."

The Newcomers (Alien Nation): District 9's aliens are most often compared to the Tenctonese, better known as the Newcomers. Like the D9 aliens, the Newcomers just can't catch a break. After fleeing from slavery on their own planet, a quarter of a million Newcomers land in Los Angeles to find a sometimes less than welcoming human population. Aside from the unfortunate names some INS officials assign the new arrivals (in the original movie, Matt Sykes' partner was named "Sam Francisco"), there are anti-alien Purists who think the Tenctonese should have stayed on Tencton, and plenty of murder, both from humans looking to eradicated the Newcomers and from those who would harvest their life-extending glands.

The Citizens of the Dominion (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine): With all of its explorations of race and morality, the Star Trek universe has had its fair share of oppressed species: the Troglyte miners who served their fellow Ardanans, the Romulans' Reman slaves, the Orion women (who only appear to be slaves), the Tosk who serve as prey for the Hunters' sport, the Bajorans who endure 50 years of Cardassian occupation, and, of course, anyone who encounters the Borg. But the Founders of the Dominion have a special talent for oppression, from engineering the supersoldier Jem'Hadar with an innate addiction to the drug ketracel white to infecting the Trevean with a congenital blight. Even the Vorta, who serve as the Dominion's middle managers, are mere slaves to the Founders, and are compelled to commit suicide if it serves their masters' purposes.

Clone Troopers (Star Wars): Slavery runs rampant in the Galactic Empire, with the Empire itself enslaving species like the Wookiees and the Mon Calamari wholesale, and some races, like the Twi'leks, would sell their own children into slavery in hopes of offering them a better life. And biological species buy and sell sentient droids (and ban them from their bars) without a second thought. But the genetically engineered (though otherwise human) Clone Troopers hold a special place among Star Wars' oppressed beings. Not only are they specifically grown for compulsory military service, they are essentially the property of the Galactic Republic, a government that has supposedly outlawed slavery.

The Ood (Doctor Who): Humans looking to have their own sentient slave without the guilt were told they could pick up an Ood servant with minimal damage to the conscience. After all, the Ood live to serve, right? Nothing in the Doctor's universe is ever so easy, and Donna and the Doctor soon discover that Ood Operations, the company supplying the alien servants, had cut off the Ood's telepathic link to the Ood brain, hampering their free will and leaving them to mix drinks and do laundry for their human masters.

Banik (Farscape): Oppression is a fairly widespread characteristic of the Farscape universe. Pretty much anyone living under Peacekeeper rule has a few humanoid rights trampled on (including the Peacekeepers themselves), and Scarrans have a pair of servant races who provide them with soldiers, intelligence agents, and technicians. But the Baniks hold an especially low place in the Farscape hierarchy. Having been mostly wiped out by Peacekeeper forces, the remaining Baniks have been enslaved, and the Banik Stark is repeatedly subjected to Scorpius' Aurora Chair, a torture and interrogation device. But the casual disregard for the lives of Baniks reaches its most shocking low when Scorpius purchases a lot of slaves that includes 9,999 Baniks and D'Argo's son Jothee. After he purchases the lot, Scorpius hands the slaves over to Natira, who, having no use for them, simply exterminates them all.

Sewer Mutants (Futurama): The 31st Century has little respect for humanoid or alien life, but at least most life forms are afforded the common courtesy of being able to walk the Earth's surface. Sewer mutants have no such privileges, requiring special permission to leave the subterranean ruins of New York. Sewer mutants, in turn, stick it to the sub-mutants, who are relegated to the sub-sewer (probably New York's original sewer system).

House Elves (Harry Potter): House Elves are powerful magical beings, with the ability to repel some of the most powerful wizards to come out of Hogwarts. But most of their magic goes toward serving their often less than noble wizard masters. House Elves are compelled to punish themselves if they disobey their masters or even utter an unkind word against them, and at least one ancient wizarding family held onto a gruesome tradition of decapitating elderly House Elves, then mounting their stuffed heads on the wall.

Dracs (Enemy Mine): Humans and Dracs are in the midst of a bitter war, so it's little surprise that the humans tolerate scavengers who capture Dracs for slave labor. But it also helps a brutal set of outlaws thrive without concern for human laws or Drac life.

Denizens of the Kzinti Empire (Known Space): The Kzinti began their lives in the galactic community as mercenaries, but once their Jotok clients taught them to use their weapons and technology, the Kzinti quickly turned on them, enslaving their former employers. From there, the Kzinti spread out across the galaxy, enslaving or eating any species they encountered. Although some subject worlds were more or less ignored by the Kzinti, some species were pushed off their worlds entirely, and breaking Kzinti law meant execution by hunting (usually followed by a feast featuring the accused as the main course). Even Kzin females, termed Kzinretti, are oppressed by their males, having been rendered subsapient by the hijacked Jotok technology.

Vortigaunt (Half-Life): Vortigaunts are the slaves of slaves, used by the Nihilanth as military forces or as factory workers. Although their enslavement forces the Vortigaunt to oppose Gordon Freeman in the first game, they get a bit of a happy ending when Freeman kills the Nihilanth. Once freed of their extradimensional masters, the Vortigaunts seek to keep humanity from falling to a similar fate, working against the Combine forces.

Neosapiens (Exosquad): Artificially created for life as laborers on Mars, the Neosapiens are stronger and faster than Terran humans, require little food and no sleep, and have a longer natural lifespan than their masters. You would think humans might think twice before creating such a physically advanced race only to enslave them, but they have to deal with the consequences in the ensuing rebellions. But the Neosapiens were not above creating servants of their own, engineering the animalistic Neo Warriors to serve as the Neosapiens' ground forces.

Mutants (X-Men): "Have you tried not being a mutant?" The classic line from X2 pretty much says it all. It's bad enough that the mutants have to cope with powers they don't always fully understand, or that their lives are punctuated by the occasional supervillain attack or alien invasion; they also have to cope with humans who hate and fear them, and religious fanatics who see them as an affront to God.

Cylons (Battlestar Galactica): Artificial beings have been oppressed by humans since Karel Čapek's R.U.R. premiered, and they've been turning on their masters just as long. The Cylons get bonus points, not because the nature of their oppression is unique, but because they're simultaneously portrayed as essentially human and yet dehumanized by their human enemies. Even forgetting racial slurs like "toaster" and "skin job" used to remind humans that their fleshier foes still have robot parts, there are some in the Colonial Fleet, like the rapist members of the Pegasus crew, who are inclined to treat the humanoid Cylons as warm-bodied objects. And the Cylons continue the cycle of oppression, with the humanoid Cylons effectively lobotomizing the Centurions and treating the Raiders as glorified pets.

Humans: Humans are the oppressed species nearly as often as they are the oppressors. Sometimes, we're enslaved by our own creations, as in the Matrix trilogy. Sometimes we've simply lost out as the dominant species of the planet, as in Planet of the Apes. Sometimes an alien invader simply decides we'll make good slaves, as in Stargate or Battlefield Earth. But we're a reliably plucky species, and even if we don't manage to pull ourselves out of the gutter, we don't make life easy for our oppressors.

Enemy Mine

I love this movie, and the imagery in this opening sequence is great. It starts with a vague date, then walks us through a whole complicated history of our attempted conquest of space, and the creatures that stood in our way. Fantastic stuff.

Escape From New York:

In 1988, the crime rate in the United States rose 400 percent. No wonder Dukakis lost.

Transmorphers

This awesome Transformers ripoff starts with a nice touch: in 2007, we made contact with other life forms. And then they reached out and touched us. Too bad it was a bad touch.

Equilibrium

This Christian Bale classic tells of a world after World War III, where the cause of humans' inhumanity to humans is eradicated: emotions. Instead of text crawl, we just get key phrases popping up on the screen.

Doom

In the year 2026, we discover a portal to Mars. A curiously solemn opening for a crazy-ass Dwayne Johnson shoot em up.

Cyborg 2

Angelina Jolie's debut movie features a rousing opening monologue by someone who really enjoys talking about cyborg prostitutes. You gotta admire that.

Escape From L.A.:

The sequel to Escape From New York is even more over the top and awesome, with a huge, complicated chain of events getting boiled down to its essentials. Crazy religious guy, huge earthquake, L.A. cut off, theocracy, president for life, boom. L.A. is now officially the United States of America's sewer. And we're putting Kurt Russell there. Any questions?

Voyage To The Prehistoric Planet

The year: 2020. The destination: Venus!

Nautilus

This time-traveling submarine movie starts out strong, with a great explanation of how we screwed with the planet, and it screwed us back. Nice montage of stock footage, accompanied by dire voiceover.

First Spaceship On Venus

This one is more upbeat, somewhat. It's the futuristic year of 1985, and we're irrigating the Gobi Desert. Go us! And then we discover a weird rock, and that means it's time to go to Venus!

To some extent, it's understandable that space adventures play fast and loose with physics. After all, who wants to watch Han Solo spend years on the journey to Alderaan, only to find that the planet has twice Earth gravity and he can barely stand up, much less swagger?

The categories of mistakes in our report card should be pretty self-explanatory, but just in case, I'll expand on them a little bit:

• There's no sound in space
• Not all planets have Earth gravity
• Planets should have diverse climates, instead of one unified climate across a "desert planet" or "forest planet."
• It shouldn't be too easy to communicate with alien creatures, without some kind of high-technology "translator" explanation.
• And it definitely shouldn't be too easy for humans to interbreed with aliens.
• Humans exposed to vacuum without a spacesuit shouldn't explode or shatter. And a "hull breach" where the ship's crew is exposed to vacuum should kill everyone instantly.
• You can't have fires in space, unless there's oxygen leaking out somehow.
• Asteroids or other objects shouldn't be able to float close together without falling into each other's gravity
• People shouldn't be able to dodge lasers and other speed-of-light weapons
• And there's no reason why someone would move in slow-motion in zero gravity.
• Faster-than-light travel is probably not ever going to be possible.