Writer: Jon Spaihts
Director: Morten Tyldum
*** WARNING - THIS REVIEW CONTAINS A LOT OF SPOILERS ***
*** BECAUSE THE TRAILERS ARE POSSIBLY A BIT MISLEADING ***
*** I TALK ABOUT SOME STUFF THAT HAPPENS TOWARDS THE END TOO ***
Okay, I'm going to quote imdb's brief description of the plot of Passengers, which is as follows: A spacecraft travelling 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.
Spacecraft travelling to a distant colony planet? That's true. Transporting thousands of people? That's also true. Malfunction in its sleep chambers? Well, there's initially a malfunction in one of the sleep chambers and, as a result, mechanic Jim Preston wakes 90 years too early. And it's true that two passengers are awakened early but the sleep chamber of Aurora Lane (Lawrence) malfunctions because Preston faffs around with it.
So why does he faff around with it? Well, after a year of wandering the ship with only android barman Arthur (Sheen) for company he takes a shine to Aurora, reading up on her from the files on the ship and hanging around her sleep chamber. Not creepy at all. So, despite the fact that Preston knows that bringing Aurora out of her sleep will basically condemn her to spending the rest of her life on the ship, he goes ahead and does the deed.
Of course, there are sequences in which Preston agonises about whether or not it's the right thing to do but this film isn't going to have Jennifer Lawrence asleep for 116 minutes so Preston reads the manual on how sleep chambers work (or don't) and hey presto! There's Aurora, striking up a friendship with the only other person awake on the spacecraft, completely unaware of the stalkery behaviour we've had to sit through.
It's at this point Passengers attempts to sell itself as an unlikely romance between Lawrence and Pratt, which can't work on any level because of how Pratt engineered the whole thing in the first place. I didn't want to see him wooing her because he shouldn't have being wooing her to begin with. "Yeah, I'll condemn this woman to almost certain death on this ship because I'm a bit horny".
The dramatic ante is eventually upped when Aurora gets wind of how she came to be awake and understandably she doesn't want to see Jim again, not before she's physically attacked him in the only scene that comes close to being convincing. In my view she should have flushed him out of the airlock and got us home a lot earlier but that doesn't happen.
What does happen is that the spaceship begins to break down in a big way, throwing Jim and Aurora together as they desperately try to work out how to avert the disaster. This final act shall henceforth be known as the "ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?" section of the movie, abbreviated to AYFKM.
So there must be hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of systems and components on the ship. So it makes sense that they find out what's wrong within a ridiculously short space of time. AYFKM? Turns out the way to sort out everything - and I mean EVERYTHING - is to open a vent which has jammed shut. AYFKM? But hey, even if they do make it through alive, Aurora is still going to hate Jim, right? Right? No? AYFKM?
Okay, surely after all of this, there can't be any more AYFKM moments. What, there's one more? AYFKM?
And yet, with a few tweaks, all of the issues I have with this film could have gone away. The first 30 minutes, with Jim waking up, trying to find a way out of his predicament and coming to terms with being the only guy on a floating paradise, is interesting, intriguing and fun. It's the decision to have him "own" Aurora's existence that's thoroughly problematic and it's a plot turn from which the story can never fully recover.
It's a shame because Michael Sheen turns in a finely tuned performance as the bartender, the spaceship is beautifully realised and there are some nice jokes about the technology on board. However, I want to see Jennifer Lawrence kicking arse, not simpering over some bloke for the flimsiest of reasons. In short, Passengers should be entertaining and exciting but ends up just being vaguely unpleasant.
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