K-SCORE: 73
Director: Morten Tyldum
Writer: Jon Spaihts
Starring: Chris Pratt, Michael Sheen, Jennifer Lawrence Fishburne
Spoiler Level: Moderate, no more than the trailer though
A unique, interesting, and disturbing sci-fi premise drives the nifty little film Passengers to its inevitably lackluster and confused conclusion. Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence deliver decent performances in roles that require a little heavy-handed acting as the script gives them little to go on with regard to characterization, but ultimately they are neither the draw nor where it goes awry.
Where Passengers is strongest, it’s strong enough to keep you riveted and enjoying your time watching. Those areas being in its core idea, the inherent inescapable drama of the conflict of people stuck for their entire lives in interspace travel when they were supposed to be in hibernative sleep, and in its setting. The set for this film is orgasmic for the sci-fi geek. Viewing chambers for seeing the enormity of the star systems in deep space, sidewalks “outside” to float free or traipse about one’s intergalactic transport, luscious bedrooms with hyper modernistic furniture and endless luxury, classy bars with robot bartenders, vacant three-star restaurants, gymnasiums with holographic displays, warehouses with a civilization’s worth of supplies hidden behind translucent icy crates, and that swimming pool where you can do laps and feel like you’re floating into the abyss. That pool is so spectacular and Jennifer Lawrence’s swimsuit so magnificent that it almost makes the prospect of a man spending his whole life trapped away from humanity worthwhile. Watching the characters interact with each other in such a lovely place inevitably tugs at you because you wish you could be there too, walk the halls of the ship, play the games, spend time alone, free, but you know too that they’re dead by time alone.
“happened too fast for them to explain it well”
Where Passengers is weakest, it’s weak enough to make you feel like you haven’t watched a very good film, and likely leave you unwilling to come back. There’s so much drama in the core concept of Chris Pratt’s character, Jim, waking up ninety years before his scheduled time, that it doesn’t need the melodrama that exists at the end of the reactor overload and central computer going haywire and causing things to breakdown in freakish manners. Yet also because of this initial conflict, it needs time for fun. Some of the best this film has to offer is in the little details also present in stories like Wall-E and Groundhog Day, which is in seeing what someone with literally endless alone time would do with themselves. Here there’s not enough of it, and what there is doesn’t lighten the mood enough. That’s because they have to progress too quickly. You’re still getting settled into the relationship of the two that are unfortunately awake for the long ride before they’re moving to a crewmember waking up, diagnosing the ship’s problems, that crewmember dying, them exploring new areas with the ship’s core mechanics, to the actual fixing of it. It’s all too much for play and in a place like that, you want a lot of play. When you see Jim send a message to Earth asking for help only to hear a cutesy automated voice say that it will take at least fifty-five years for a response, you love the story you’re watching. Little details that speak to enormous conflict. But when you see him holding a door against the raging flames of a “reactor core” venting into space, you don’t really buy it. It happened too fast for them to explain it well, and it wreaks of having been hastily thrown together for the purposes of the resolution the film demanded. The writer had a great idea, in other words, but not a strong full story.
Passengers is the epitome of a movie I feel bad for because it didn’t have enough time, which is ironic given the premise. I’m guessing the optimal time to tell this story is between six and ten hours. It can’t build in the necessary details that would make its conclusion as awesome as its concept. But ten hour stories aren’t often told. They’re either squeezed into two hour films or extended to serieses that have uncertain ends. I’m begging the storytelling world to learn this lesson.