Movie Review: Passengers

Not so much a meet-cute as a meet-euch, Passengers squanders an intriguing premise and likable leads on a third act that loses direction and floats off into the expanse of nothingness.

Here’s a pitch: The world is over-populated and expensive, and you’re offered the opportunity to live on a remote yet habitable planet, approximately 120 Earth-years away, as one of its first people.

The ‘Homestead’ corporation will put you in hibernation, to cut down on commute time, and you’ll wake up on the giant Starship Avalon alongside 5,000 other enterprising colonials, to enjoy the final four months of the journey in style.

It’s fitted out with cinemas, gyms, swimming pools, multi-ethnic restaurants and a bar, tended by friendly android Arthur (Michael Sheen, a delight).

It is also lacking contingency plans, as mechanic Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) discovers when he accidentally awakens from his slumber 90 years too early.

Doomed to wander aimlessly, without company, for the rest of his natural life (and this is where you might want to look away if you consider essential plot points that have been hidden from marketing materials as spoilers)...

... he decides to wake up another passenger.

Would you be shocked to learn he picks Aurora Lane, the sleeping writer who looks an awful lot like Jennifer Lawrence? It goes without saying: (*creepy shiver*)

It’s no surprise the advertisers want to keep this instrumental element of Passengers as far as possible from potential viewers; not because it gives anything away, but because it’s a deeply upsetting basis for a big screen romance, which is what director Morten Tyldum and screenwriter Jon Spaihts wrongheadedly attempt to massage this anti-consent parable into.

It’s not Jim’s decision—ultimately, to condemn Aurora to a drawn-out death, either by his side or totally alone—that makes Passengers ugly. That’s called conflict, and Pratt is quite impressive while playing out the emotional torment that drives him to make such an awful, damning decision. If we boycotted movies that had figures making bad (even evil) choices, we’d be left with… what, Cars? (Welp, actually no, because in that, Lightning McQueen reneges on his offer to pave the road he ruined in Radiator Springs, and vainly practices his driving instead. So, we’re left with zero movies.)

Had Passengers been a slowly simmering, unfolding mystery about crippling loneliness and its resulting psychological trauma, as it is for the first two acts, you’d call it compelling and thoughtful. Combine those character intentions with the innovative setting and ‘what if’ premise, and it might have been a profound mirror for audiences, wondering ‘what’ they’d do if similarly stuck in space. But Solaris this ain't.

It’s the late move to suddenly ignore all that—hoping we’ll care for the well-being of Jim and Aurora as the ship enters perilous skies, as well as the health of their relationship—that sours Passengers. I’ll just assume a bit too much oxygen got into Spaihts and Tyldum’s helmets; that’s the only explanation for them thinking they were making a romance in which a killer effectively conspires to live with his victim for eternity, and she earnestly pledges to him, “You die, I die.” (Lawrence is unfortunately given the flick’s most hysterical lines, and I don’t mean ‘funny’.)

That’s not even the only misstep of the third act, which spends an inordinate amount of time on one of those classic “fix the reactor!” sequences, which is about as interesting to watch as, well, fixing a reactor. Good thing all the problems discovered on this quite-buggy ship can be repaired with a mechanic’s touch, and aren't reliant on, say, an astrophysicist or interstellar navigator. Sticking doo-hickeys into prong-holes apparently does the job, more often than not.

Tyldum’s vision of a star-bound cruise liner is expectedly antiseptic and unimaginative. Is that a comment on the clinical ‘Homestead’ organisation, which Aurora is especially critical of for turning colonisation into a money-spinning business? Passengers only shrugs. It’s hoping you’re here to simply watch Pratt and Lawrence make moony eyes at one another and make-out. Most will be, and could you blame them? Punters couldn't have anticipated how gross the context of such canoodling would be.

If the makers had interrogated the themes of their feature even slightly, we could argue that Passengers—which other critics have already accused of being a tribute to gaslighting and Stockholm syndrome, respectively—is a film that intelligently asks: What would you forgive in a relationship?

Rather, we’re left with this, after a promising start: What would you forgive in a movie?

2.5/5

In cinemas January 1, 2017. Rated M for mature themes.

Photo: Roadshow