'Passengers' A Review

Passengers is a scifi romance about a generation ship on a hundred year voyage to colonize an Earth like planet. As a result of asteroid damage Jim Preston(Chris Pratt) is awoken. After spending a year in solitude he decides to wake up Aurora Lane(Jennifer Lawrence). They fall in love, she eventually discovers his deceit, and they come together in the end to save the ship. Some might think this brief synopsis is a spoiler but given how predictable and obvious the plot is the arc is relatively intuitive.

Pratt and Lawrence both have considerable charm but Pratt's relatively narrow range and Lawrence script restriction make both performances boring, incongruous, and at points disturbing. The main issue of the story is one of its three disparate plot points- essentially the Stockholm Syndrome of Lawrence's character. And this is handled with such flippant indifference it, essentially, hamstrings the entire movie. Pratt doesn't convey the darkness and duplicity that would make it believable and Lawerence's character is written as a two dimensional foil.

It's clear a lot of money was spent on the movie and all the space stuff looks really cool. But without a cogent narrative it doesn't really matter. There are three different movies contained within the bloated and unfortunate Passengers. An isolated-in-space tale(the first act with Pratt alone), a space thriller about a creep who manipulates a woman into falling in love with him(the second act), and a caught in space disaster(third act). Any one of which is a movie that could and probably would work with the two leads and production design but taken together it is a fatty, emotionally flat, and periodically offensive piece of collage.

Slick and shiny but utterly lacking nuance or even passable narrative logic.

Don't See It.