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Passengers


Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Chris Pratt, Michael Sheen, and Laurence Fishburne
Directed by: Morten Tyldum
Screenplay by: Jon Spaihts

     It's a long journey from one planet to another.  What could possibly go wrong?  I mean, nothing ever goes wrong in movies like this, right?
     The starship Avalon is making a 120-year journey from an overcrowded, center of everything Earth, to a colony world, Homestead II.  The crew is asleep in hibernation pods, along with 5,000 passengers hoping to create new lives for themselves on Homestead II.  All have left everything and everyone they've ever known behind on Earth.  So, for 120 years, the Avalon is on autopilot.
     The film opens up to the ship already in trouble.  It flies through an asteroid field (in a quite beautiful scene) and this causes the Avalon to have a few malfunctions.  One of the problems is one of the hibernation pods waking up one passenger early.  90 years early to be precise.  That passenger is Jim Preston (Chris Pratt).  It takes a few hours for Jim to realize that he's been woken up early and that there's no way for him to go back to sleep.  Why's that?  Well, there's never ever in the history of these hibernation pods (which is apparently a long history at this point), been a malfunction like his.  Sound a bit like HAL 9000 to anyone?  So, Jim is completely alone on the ship with no way to wake up the crew or anyone else.  Then there's Arthur (Michael Sheen), the bartender at a bar on the ship.  He's a machine designed to look and interact like a human.  So at least Jim has someone to talk to now, to an extent.  He also explores every nook and cranny of the ship.  He entertains himself playing basketball by himself and Dance Dance Revolution (or whatever they have on the ship) himself.  He also gets the same boring food at the mess hall because he appears not to have a gold class ticket to get anything like a fancy coffee or something like that.
     Jim is awake for about a year before he discovers the blonde, the one and only Aurora Lane (Jennifer Lawrence).  By this time, Jim has scavenged the Avalon for long enough that he's learned how to wake someone up from their hibernation pod.  Aurora, the sleeping beauty (the parallel is so obvious that it's a little ridiculous), appears to be the perfect woman.  Jim has read about her to the point where it's creepy.  But he's been alone for a year, so can you really blame him?  For months he debates back and forth whether to wake her.  If he lets her sleep, she'll wake up probably after he's long dead somewhere on the ship, and ready to start her new life on Homestead II.  But if he wakes her, he dooms her to the same fate he suffers.
     Well it's obvious what happens based on the trailer and the film moves into a completely different genre.  After they've tried to figure out together what to do to either go back to sleep or wake someone else that might be able to help them, they exhaust all their options.  They develop a love interest for each other and the film becomes pretty much a romance for much of the rest of its duration.  It's quite conventional of a romance at this point; the couple gets together (although they are rather forced together based on the fact that there is nobody else on the ship), falls in love, relationship is almost threatened, and then get back together in the end.
     Passengers is a film that frankly doesn't know what kind of film it wants to be.  I would probably classify it as a science fiction thriller, but it could also be considered a romance.  The run time is nearly two hours, which gives the director, Morten Tyldum, time to play with both genres.  The problem is that none of it feels real, nor does any of it feel natural.  Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt are great together in real life if you watch the talk shows that they've been on together promoting this film.  There is a lot of off screen chemistry between them as friends, but it only somewhat translates to them on the screen.  They feel almost too compatible together as characters simply because of the situation they have both found themselves in.  Jim tells Arthur that Aurora is the perfect woman for her, but it's not clear how she feels about Jim until they actually hook up in the movie.  What if Jim isn't the perfect match for her?  I found myself wondering this question as soon as Aurora is introduced on screen.  Now, I feel like I'm talking about a romance film.  But this is a Sci-Fi film.
     Another odd thing is that the Avalon is in nearly perfect working order.  Nothing else appears to be wrong with the ship other than Jim's pod woke him up early, and there isn't even a reasonable explanation as to why that is.  Why is that the system that is damaged and not something else, like the ship's main shield or hull integrity?  The mechanics of this ship don't make a whole lot of sense.
     Passengers is a film that is well executed to make for an interesting viewing experience, but lacks in its concept.  It spends too much time trying to show the viewer that it is an innovative and original film because of its blend of two distinct genres, yet fails to completely flush both out for a completely blended-genre movie.  This is a film that gets lost in itself.  It spends too much time on the details and not enough on the overall arc of the story.  It is a film that leaves you wondering what it could be instead of thinking about what it is.
     I give Passengers a B-.

Image source: ScienceFiction.com

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