Passengers Review
One of the bigger star power films released this past Christmas season was Passengers. With Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence teaming up in the intergalactic love story, this one had a high price on its head and a lot of expectations. Early on some thought with Academy Award nominated director Morten Tyldum was a sign this was an Oscar-potential movie, but as the release drew closer and closer, and the marketing picked up, it felt like the air was deflated out of the balloon and as a result, the film has been performing a little lower than original expected. Plus critical and fan reactions have been less than positive. Well, I don’t know what I was on or what the difference was, but I genuinely enjoyed myself watching this one. It’s not like it’s one of the year’s best or anything, but as a big dumb sci-fi love story, I actually thought it was entertaining.
So the basic story follows Jim, played by Chris Pratt, who is one of 5,000 passengers on an intergalactic journey to Homestead II, an earth-like planet where people like Jim will get a second chance at life. But unfortunately his hibernation pod malfunctions and he is woken up 90 years before he reaches his destination. Only being 30 years into the journey, contact with Earth is impossible and as he discovers, there is no way to reactive the hibernation pod. At first he’s at peace with it and enjoys life on the voyage, a god among hibernating kings, if you will. But soon he discovers a pretty blonde, Aurora, who ends up being woken up as well, roughly one year after Jim’s awakening. While at first its a continued utopia for the two as a love grows between them, as more people begin to awaken and a painful truth is revealed, the ship begins to majorly malfunction and its up to the two to save not only their own lives, but the over 5,000 people hibernating.
So for a few strengths: it was fun to see the pairing of both Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence. While neither is particularly Oscar-worthy, I enjoyed seeing them together. Next up I’ll praise the production design. The way the ship looks is pretty unique and the interiors of the ship look awesome. Paired with Thomas Newman’s pretty good score, the opening five minutes or so are pretty much a love letter to Ridley Scott’s opening of Alien (1979), which I genuinely appreciated. Some say rip-off, but I disagree. Anyways, I also thought the pace was really solid. The film never dragged, well, until the third act, and it never felt like we were breezing by. There’s also a nice little touch that an homage to The Shining (1980) with a robotic bartender, and that I also appreciated. Now sure, a lot of people have also been criticizing this as Titanic (1997) in space with the way Lawrence and Pratt are young and hot stars and the situation they’re in and all that, and while I agree yes it does have a feel that’s pretty close to that, that didn’t stop my enjoyment of the film. It was an entertaining film for me, the production design was cool, the music was cool, and the problems I had at the end of the film didn’t cripple the film.
Now you might ask, what didn’t I enjoy? Well, by the time we get to the third act, we’ve found out quite a bit about these two main characters, Jim and Aurora, and just having them go back and forth conversing was entertaining. But the third act has to think it’s a big popcorn action movie that was over the top. There’s a big conflict that makes the two enemies by the third act, and if you’ve seen the trailers or any movie, for that matter, you know they’re going to end up together in the end, and I think it would have been much more interesting for the two to come back together or separate entirely if they had talked it over instead of forcing them to work together to fix the ship. And one thing, we see Jim have a relationship with the hibernating Aurora but we never really get a sense that the other passengers mean anything. Sure, there’s 5000 of them, so it’s difficult to make that connection, but it would have been nice if they had gone through the profiles of maybe just one of the other passengers the way Jim does with Aurora in the film. Plus the very ending, like the last two minutes or so, were extremely rushed, and the ending left me very cold and when the end credits start, in the theater I audibly say, “Oh,”, like I expected another scene or two wrapping everything up.
Again, this isn’t in my opinion one of the best films of the year or anything, but it’s certainly not as bad as the reviews would have you believe. I say if you’re a fan of either Lawrence or Pratt, their natural charisma as a star shine brighter than the sometimes dismal character moments, you’ll enjoy it, and if you enjoy those sci-fi action flicks like The Fifth Element (1997) or more recently Interstellar (2014), you might like this one, too. Let me stress one more time, this came off as an entertaining popcorn flick to me, not necessarily a deep, complex character study, and I didn’t expect it to be. If the mood catches you right, maybe we’ll be on the same page, and for some, that might not be necessary. It might just be good enough as it is.
My rating: 7/10.
