Passengers (2016)

Passengers

Director: Morten Tyldum

Writer: Jon Spaihts

Stars: Jennifer Lawrence, Chris Pratt, Michael Sheen

PG-13 | 1h 56min | Adventure, Drama, Romance

Read imdb review Here

Movie Rating ★★☆☆☆

 A missed opportunity

Neither the rapport between Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt nor the impressive effects can quite redeem this shallow sci-fi

It might be easier to forgive the cursory plotting and the underdeveloped characters of this lightweight sci-fi if the whole story wasn’t predicated on a single act of staggering selfishness.

Passengers on the spaceship Avalon spend most of the 125-year journey in suspended animation. They are scheduled to be roused from their sleep pod just a few months before they land on their new colony world, Homestead II. But something goes wrong and one pod malfunctions. Engineer Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) finds himself awake and alone with 90 years still left to travel. His only company is android bartender Arthur (Michael Sheen). Sheen is chillingly smarmy in the role, giving a hint of the performance that might have been if someone had bothered to write some snappier dialogue. Jim is close to hurling himself out of the nearest airlock when he stumbles upon Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence).

Beautiful, blond and blissfully oblivious, she fascinates him. He drunkenly lolls next to her pod, clad just in a pair of sweaty boxers. He logs on to the ship’s database and devours her personal information – it’s a cross between cyber-stalking and rooting through her underwear, and it’s incredibly creepy. But things get worse – after briefly wrestling with his conscience, Jim wakes Aurora up. For the film-makers, it’s a minor obstacle on the route to romance; for the audience, it’s a deal-breaker. Regardless of what comes next – whatever redemptive heroics the screenplay constructs for Jim – he is still the perv who practically frotteured himself against a woman’s sleep pod before stealing her life to be his chosen playmate. It’s an opportunity squandered because Lawrence and Pratt have a spicy chemistry, and the effects, particularly a zero-gravity swimming pool sequence, are impressive.

Read full review at the guardian

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Movie Rating ★★☆☆☆

Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt's sinister, sexless romance gets lost in space

You wake up on a giant spaceship called the Avalon, heading towards an off-world colony, with 4,999 fellow travellers still in cryosleep. Your pod has malfunctioned: there are 90 years left of a 120-year journey, and you’re entirely alone, save for an android bartender which can only simulate empathy, and bears this creepy resemblance to a never-more-dapper Michael Sheen.

The budget is big for this whole hypothesis, and you’re Chris Pratt, so you get to wander around the empty corridors of what looks like a broken strand of DNA gliding through the cosmos, fully equipped with bay-window pool, holographic dance-offs and a large number of cleaning robots. How long before you attempt suicide?

Pratt’s character in Passengers, a scruffy mechanic called Jim, quickly exhausts the entertainment options, which luckily, for his own sake, aren’t limited to in-flight viewings of Passengers. Within a year, he grows a long, straggly Robinson Crusoe beard, and starts doing little but depressively chomp his way through breakfast cereal.

Then he spots Jennifer Lawrence, serenely kipping in her pod as a journalist called Aurora from New York. A lightbulb goes off. Could he? Should he? I mean, he quite obviously shouldn’t. Will he? Of course he will.

It’s unsurprising that a male screenwriter – Doctor Strange and Prometheus’ Jon Spaihts – cooked up this idea, which essentially co-opts Aurora as an oblivious His Girl Friday to lonesome Jim, a bespoke soulmate for his epic commute. What’s more depressing is how little thought Spaihts put in to actually giving her a character.

Aurora has dreams of being recognised as a Great Writer in many generations’ time, when her reportage about flying to the “Homestead II” and back can be absorbed by humanity. This is intended to make her seem like more than a total blank, but does the exact opposite, especially when we get chunks of her work-in-progress. If we’re this desperate for solipsistic page-filler circa 2350, the species really ought to be put out of its misery.

Lawrence is more gorgeous than ever, but it’s not only Pratt’s Jim getting his perv on: the movie finds every possible excuse to strip them down to their skimpies, whether we’re in the flirtation phase or what. Fair enough – the one hope this match-making exercise has is scorching chemistry.

But a family-friendly rating dictates that the camera shuck away and hide under the bed, the canteen table, or what-have-you, performing these shy, giggly manoeuvres which treat physical need as either a taboo or a feeble punchline.

As a directing assignment, it at least proves that The Imitation Game was no fluke: Morten Tyldum can make glossily sexless, space-cadet guff out of whatever half-baked script you throw at him. The attempts at humour are wince-inducing. Pratt does get to play a terrified conscience, a naughty schoolboy sure he’s going to be found out – but someone might have spared him the chuckle-alongs to Aurora’s lame jokes, which just make Jim seem wholly devoid of taste.

Past the halfway mark, just about every detail gets progressively more head-scratchy. How is Jim, a mechanic, able to disable a cryopod with neat efficiency but never to repair one? Why is the ship equipped with one sole medical scanner-pod? Sheen’s Arthur, a swish mixologist lit to resemble Joe Turkel’s Lloyd from The Shining, has been programmed by the screenwriter to fulfill pivotal plot services that make no sense whatsoever.

We could ask, too, what reason these characters have for leaving their Earth lives behind. The answer is that they have no lives behind, being characters – one-line resumés, sign-on opportunities for movie stars who should know better – rather than people.

Passengers, which abruptly turns into a kind of Poseidon-Gravity mash-up to engineer the unbelievably cheesy redemption of Pratt’s Jim, has some of the most doltish third-act “plotting” we’ve seen in a while – quick, blast-the-inferno-out-of-the- cargo-hatch, I’ll-hold-the-door type stuff. It’s crummy and desperate.

But worse awaits, with the starry-eyed pretence that life might magically flourish with only these two to keep each other company. You’d tire of the one-liners in weeks, the chaste sex even sooner. Pick an airlock, I’m staying in mine. See you on the other side.

Read full review at The telegraph

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