Movie Review: Passengers
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Imagine that you're a passenger on a vehicle of some kind.
Then imagine that the first half of your trip is promising and intriguing and provocative.
Next, imagine that at about the halfway point, whoever is driving or piloting this vehicle unexpectedly changes direction, drives way off course and deposits you somewhere else, somewhere much less interesting and satisfying.
Well, welcome: you've just been a passenger at Passengers. And you're strongly disappointed.
As holiday gifts from the movie world go, Passengers is sensationally wrapped. It's what's inside that's problematic.
Passengers is a handsome science fiction space travel thriller that aspires to be accepted into the genre's modern wing along with such offerings as The Martian, Interstellar, Gravity, and Arrival.
To that end, it pairs two of the most popular and successful stars of the last few movie years.
With Jennifer Lawrence in the female lead as a writer and civilian space traveler, viewers get an Oscar winner (for Silver Linings Playbook) and four-time Oscar nominee, as well as the lead in the hit Hunger Games trilogy. And with male lead Chris Pratt as yet another civilian space traveler, a mechanical engineer by trade, they get the star of three blockbusters within two years: The Lego Movie, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Jurassic World. And these two treasures help to raise expectations with a nifty setup and buildup through the film's half.
Then things go south. Boy, do they ever.
The plot involves a spacecraft – the luxury interstellar spaceship known as the Avalon, bound for the Homestead II Colony on a distant planet 120 years away – and transporting a few hundred crew members and 5,000 passengers who are now in suspended animation, encased in pods, intent on leaving overpopulated Earth behind. But a malfunction develops, 30 years into their 120-year autopilot journey, in one of the sleep chambers and Jim Preston (Pratt) is awakened six decades earlier than scheduled.
Waking up 90 years early, not being able to return to suspended animation, and then going crazy from the loneliness and faced with the prospect of growing old and dying alone, Preston spends about a year this way – with only a robot bartender (Michael Sheen, channeling The Shining) to communicate with -- and then, after wrestling with his conscience, decides to wake the fetching Aurora Lane (Lawrence), one of the other passengers.
Talk about the meet-cute phenomenon.
Is this situation truly romantic or have we moved into stalker territory? Food for thought. Anyway, they pretty quickly do something that resembles falling in love, the inevitable revelation about the truth of Jim's behavior occurs, and later – as if we've been transported into a different movie altogether -- the ship's malfunction threatens the ship's entire population, and only Jim and Aurora, suddenly capable of superheroic derring-do, can save the rest of the crew and passengers.
When the heck did we sign up for this generic action extravaganza?
Norwegian director Morten Tyldum (The Imitation Game, Buddy, Headhunters, Fallen Angels) works from a screenplay by Jon Spaihts that gives up on itself halfway there and drops its initially compelling "What would you do if...?" premise as if it were a hot potato.
Passengers appears at first – even at second – to be character-driven. And in Lawrence and Pratt, it boasts leads with charm, charisma, intelligence, and likability. But the second and third acts of this script leave them lost in space.
So we'll awaken from 2 stars out of 4 for a lonely-guy-in-turmoil thriller that provides a modicum of popcorn entertainment, but then, like an unprincipled captain, abandons the ship well ahead of its unsuspecting Passengers.
