Passengers Review

PG13:  Sexuality, Nudity and Action/Peril 

Columbia Pictures, LStar Capital, Village Roadshow Pictures, Wanda Pictures, Original Film, Company Films, Start Motion Pictures

1 Hr and 56 Minutes

Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Chris Pratt, Michael Sheen, Laurence Fishburne, Andy García

REVIEW:  Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence, two of the hottest actors working in Hollywood today. When you're given the chance to put them into a film together, you seize that opportunity and do the best with it. That's why you have the two here in Morten Tyldum’s Passengers where you have two of the most gorgeous I might just say sexiest actors of right stranded together in space. Yeah, believability is out the window. 

A spacecraft traveling to a distant colony planet and transporting thousands of people has a malfunction in its sleep chambers. As a result, two passengers are awakened 90 years early.

THE GOOD: When you have a movie set in space, it is your obligated duty to make it look beautiful and by God the film does. When you see this spaceship it is uniquely designed outside the usually designed spaceship. The visuals in this film are breathtaking. It may not be in the ranks of Gravity of how beautiful the visuals depicts space, but it ranks right next to The Martian. The machines and various incubators have creative functions where something small like a needle can be used as a defibrillator. To me, that’s pretty clever. Even the majority of the elements when the ship starts to malfunction gives itself to pretty mesmerizing visuals especially during a sequence when no gravity is activated and everything begins to float.

One of the most standout characters isn’t Jim or Aurora but in fact, this humanoid robot named Arthur played by newly announced politician Micheal Sheen. Throughout the film, he has this charm that makes you smile whenever he’s onscreen. Imagine if you had robot bartender who is good enough to be your friend although he tends to be gossipy. That is this character in a nutshell. Most of the comedic parts of the film come from him.

For a two-hour film, it is pretty entertaining due to a good chemistry between Pratt and Lawrence. They have different characters with different personalities. Pratt’s Jim is like Star-Lord and Lawerence’s Aurora is like Katniss. Oh, wait that’s entirely where this film went wrong.

THE BAD: In all honesty, I loved this film when it was called Wall-E. 

I’m going to compare this to two arbitrary things one TV and one film because it kept reminding me of these two: Wall-E and The Last Man on Earth. I would compare this to other space operas such as Gravity, Sunshine, because the film starts to rip off scenes of those especially for their climax, but throughout I just kept thinking of Wall-E and The Last Man on Earth. Even the score sounded like a mixture between Wall-E and Finding Nemo especially when it rip-offs the fire hydrant flight scene. I then researched who did the score, Thomas Newman, who actually did compose Wall-E and Finding Nemo. So yeah, TRAITOR!

Last week on The Last Pratt From Earth.

Passengers begin very strong with a good 15 to 20 minutes of Chris Pratt’s character Jim waking up and experiencing this ship on his own where he grows a Will Forte beard. It opens with a lot of promise, but then after the 20-minute mark when Jim feels alone and needs a companion, the film immediately begins to crash and burn. The way Lawrence’s character Aurora is introduced into the film is freaking messed up. It is creepy and the motive is creepy. You thought the motive of Oscar Issac creating robots in Ex Machina was creepy, Chris Pratt’s motive of bringing Jennifer Lawrence into the film is creepy as hell and this destroys the tone for the rest of the film. 

This is when comparisons come into play.

The reason something like Wall-E or The Last Man on Earth worked is because you have these two characters coping with loneliness in a predicament that they’re in where they’re longing to connect with anyone mostly a female. When women are introduced, not only does it have a setup, but they have a distinct personality to bounce off our protagonist where it takes 30 minutes into the film or 3 episodes into the show for you to root for these characters to get together.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

The reason this film doesn’t work is because, Jim and Aurora don’t meet by chance but he looks over her body in a hibernation pod and gets so infatuated that he wakes her up and tries to keep it a secret from her. It dramatically shifts the tone and it’s controversially creepy. It doesn’t have any other way to introduce her into the film when arguably you can, but it decides to take it to creepy territory. He could have woke up any other person with less attractiveness to him that would have been a much more entertaining (and believable) film. It’s something that is addressed briefly and brushed over for 10 minutes and that’s it. Yeah Phil Miller in the first season of The Last Man on Earth was shallow and looking for sex, but throughout the show you see him progress and turn into a humble person that he even ends up with Carol, the first person he met in the entire series.

Though they do have different occupations and different class, they don’t have much character outside the realms of their characters you see them have in other roles. They do have chemistry, but the screenwriter Jon Spaihts (co-writer of Prometheus and the upcoming The Mummy) writes them so thin that you don’t feel for their characters. Jim says the most cheesiest lines to Aurora that feels like it taken out of a Nicholas Sparks book that even Star-Lord would make fun of him for saying it. The film takes the term “space opera” and turns it into “soap opera”. Because of it being a romance film, you will get crying and I have come to the conclusion that Jennifer Lawrence is the worst crier. When you see her cry in Hunger Games the story elements with death around Katniss is emotional before you can judge her laughable facial expression. In this, there is barely any stakes. Since you can see how predictable the film becomes as it constantly falls into familiar territory taken from other and better movies the emotion isn’t there. So when Jennifer Lawrence cries you laugh at not only her facial expression but the cheesy reasoning behind it.

CAN WE STOP WASTING BROTHERS IN SPACE MOVIES?! Laurence Fishburne appears in the end of the second act only to set up the third and he’s gone. Not only that is unintentionally funny especially if you see this after Forest Whitaker in Rogue One, but it’s almost insulting. BUT if that’s not insulting, the film has a cameo by Andy Garcia that ends the film with absolutely no dialogue.

LAST STATEMENT: Passengers is a visually beautiful attempt at a vehicle for Lawrence and Pratt, but it’s arguably shallow premise and uninspired plotting makes this just an idea lost in space.

Rating: 1.5/5 | 37%

Super Scene: Aurora beats the crap out of Jim