Passengers Movie Review

Released: 21st December 2016

Length: 116 Minutes

Certificate: 12A

Director: Morten Tyldum

Starring: Chris Pratt, Jennifer Lawrence, Laurence Fishburne and Michael Sheen

With two big names at its centre, Passengers aims to close out 2016 with a contained, solitary trip through the cosmos. It’s been subjected to quite the marketing blitz but the film simply can’t make a lasting impression.

Passengers takes place aboard the Avalon, a ship travelling towards an idealistic new home on the colony of Homestead II. For no apparent reason, engineer Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) awakens from hyper sleep, finding himself the only passenger on the vessel to do so. He discovers that he woke up ninety years too soon, condemned to a lonely life before the ship reaches its destination. With only a suave android bartender (Michael Sheen) for company and his options running out, he makes the extremely dubious decision to wake up a woman named Aurora, all the while running a lie that her pod also malfunctioned. The film is made up of three separate which have their own individual problems. First there’s the opening which sees Jim on his own, trapped on an empty ship with no means of refreezing himself or reaching the crew for help. Unfortunately, it doesn’t explore that isolation very effectively, opting to use basic details to show the passage of time rather than allowing Pratt to flex his acting ability. The second part is a love story between Jim and Aurora; it takes up a good chunk of the film and really wants the audience to believe that it is genuine, but because the morals are skewed, it’s almost impossible to take seriously, not to mention the fact that Passengers never explores the nasty undertones of selfishness and lust. The final act is much like a disaster film in which a crisis aboard the Avalon must be resolved; it’s here that a new character (Played by Laurence Fishburne) is suddenly introduced and things hastily wrap up without pulling the audience into the mystery of why it all happened. When the three acts are put together, the plot of Passengers becomes rushed and messy, never finding a moment to make its setting and characters work together properly.

Sadly, the characters don’t fare much better. Chris Pratt, despite being planted in isolation at the film’s outset, feels flat here; even his scenes with the other characters feel quite restrained, never rising to the kind of intensity that would grip the situation. Jennifer Lawrence fares a lot better, with her two major realisations being good moments that play to her strengths as an actress. Despite this, both main leads also have very basic characteristics. We know that Jim is an engineer and Aurora is a writer and journalist but they never really get developed beyond those bases. Michael Sheen is a rather basic commentator on the action and as for Lawrence Fishburne, his screen time is horribly limited by plot contrivance, marking the second time since 2010’s Predators where a potentially interesting role for him has been snubbed by limited material. Passengers mostly falls into the camp of the more mindless blockbusters, not bothering to give its talented cast a solid script to work with.

Much like many sci-fi flicks, Passengers is a looker but on this occasion strong special effects can’t really make up for a broken story. It’s not a complete lack of effort here; the backdrops are suitably stunning, though these are often used in many of its contemporaries. Ambient music pieces do well enough at selling the vast celestial setting and the ship itself gives way to a fair few long shots to show off its scale. Unfortunately, a twisting ship design is where much of the originality ends; Passengers borrows more than its fair share of tropes from several contemporaries including the likes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Sunshine, Prometheus and Gravity to name a few. Despite its well-produced special effects, this hodgepodge of different components brands Passengers as a rather derivative title, one which loses much of the impact it could have had.

Passengers is a massively disjointed production which doesn’t do enough to set itself apart from other major sci-fi films. Its one big idea is built on something so morally bankrupt that it creates a massive disconnect with everything that goes on. Some spurts of good acting from Lawrence and a heap of special effects do hold it up slightly but it remains a mostly misguided, unremarkable outing.

Rating: 2/5 Stars (Disappointing)