Passengers
Directed by: Morten Tyldum
Written by: Jon Spaihts
Starring: Chris Pratt, Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Sheen, Laurence Fishburne
Adventure/Drama/Romance - 116 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 21 Dec 2016
Written by: Jon Spaihts
Starring: Chris Pratt, Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Sheen, Laurence Fishburne
Adventure/Drama/Romance - 116 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 21 Dec 2016
Sony may hype their latest product as an action-thriller all they want, but it’s a deceptive campaign. Passengers sports a dramatic core with a moral dilemma nucleus, surrounding by a romantic periphery, doused in science-fiction. There are sequences here and there with fireballs and yelling, but to say those few bits represent the whole is deliberately misleading. Unfortunately, where one discovers originality, one also stumbles upon spoilers. Please be advised Passengers is best enjoyed knowing little to nothing about its plot, characters, and their situation and decisions. However, once you learn the truth, you are going to want to pick a side.
Writer Jon Spaihts throws a ‘what would you do’ philosophical conundrum at the audience. Judge not, lest ye be put into Jim Preston’s shoes. Is he a villain or perhaps does he deserve your sympathy? 30 years into a 120-year long voyage on a starship to colonize a new planet, Jim Preston (Chris Pratt, The Magnificent Seven) wakes up. His pod malfunctioned, he cannot put himself back to sleep, and now he is stuck all alone on a gargantuan cruise liner of a spaceship surrounding by 5000 slumbering humans. Jim will be long dead by the time everybody else is supposed to wake up and that is not fair. What kind of life is that? You expect to wake up and try your hand at building up a new planet but instead, you endlessly roam the corridors of a gorgeous, but empty ship.
Writer Jon Spaihts throws a ‘what would you do’ philosophical conundrum at the audience. Judge not, lest ye be put into Jim Preston’s shoes. Is he a villain or perhaps does he deserve your sympathy? 30 years into a 120-year long voyage on a starship to colonize a new planet, Jim Preston (Chris Pratt, The Magnificent Seven) wakes up. His pod malfunctioned, he cannot put himself back to sleep, and now he is stuck all alone on a gargantuan cruise liner of a spaceship surrounding by 5000 slumbering humans. Jim will be long dead by the time everybody else is supposed to wake up and that is not fair. What kind of life is that? You expect to wake up and try your hand at building up a new planet but instead, you endlessly roam the corridors of a gorgeous, but empty ship.
Mind you, the ship is a sight to behold. It functions as a plug and play setting. If Spaihts thought Jim might enjoy a theater, dance club, bar, and outside space walks, he’s got it. There is nobody to share it with though. There is Arthur (Michael Sheen, Nocturnal Animals), a robot bartender, to somewhat interact with, but while comforting, his responses are programmed advice fortune cookie one-liners and fake empathetic understanding. Jim is Tom Hanks from Cast Away, but rather than create Wilson the volleyball, Jim fantasizes about the possibilities of sharing his time with the most beautiful, sexually attractive girl on the spaceship, Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence, Joy).
What would you do? You are doomed to spend the next 60-70 years of your life in solitary wandering. Perhaps you kill yourself? Or, maybe you wake up the woman of your dreams, lie about how she woke up, and enjoy the remaining decades side by side. If you’ve at least seen the movie poster, you know what Jim does. Aurora is devastated that she woke up and will never reach the new planet. She is a writer and dreamed of spending one year on the new planet, then traveling the 120 years back to Earth being the only human ever to reach a new planet and return. Now, the only stories she can write about are missed opportunities and spending eternity with a mechanic named Jim.
Jim and Aurora discuss why they chose to jettison Earth for the stars but it is only perfunctory. Jim’s reason is an aw-shucks half explanation about putting his mechanic skills to use in undiscovered country. The people on Earth don’t fix anything anymore, they replace. Aurora’s reasons hint at deeper motivations and you wish director Morten Tyldum (The Imitation Game) would take more time to ferret it out. Aurora’s father was a Pulitzer-winning author which means Aurora’s reason for leaving may be genealogical. If your father is one of Earth’s greatest writers, what will you do at least match his success? Talk like this is brief and only meant to get Jim and Aurora closer to one another because Passengers is really a romance.
Jim has all the time in the universe to take it slow, put on the charm, and woo Aurora. There are restaurants, witty banter with Arthur the bartender, and small slices of additions to the ship to remind Aurora of home. But as the rule for any central cinematic romance, what follows Boy Meets Girl, Boy Gets Girl, is the cruel Boy Loses Girl. Of course Aurora discovers the truth; what kind of movie would Passengers be if she didn’t? We see Aurora’s reaction and horror at the truth through Jim’s eyes so it is more challenging to feel the painful gut punch Aurora must feel. She was murdered!…but she is still alive! We know in our minds Jim committed a crime here waking Aurora up, but our hearts tell us ‘But they’re so good together!’ Space soap opera at its finest.
Jon Spaihts is no stranger to following a man set adrift; he explored similar territory in Marvel’s Doctor Strange following that fledgling, scarred superhero wannabe wander around like a lost puppy in search of something Jim Preston is also searching for, a spot correction for how life was supposed to be. Surrounded by a spiral, rotating starship, futuristic gadgets, gizmos, and gargantuan sets, these immense structures almost overwhelm our two leads. Tyldum succeeds in showing us how lost and alone Jim and Aurora are in the vastness of empty, interstellar space. I love the bar which is a throwback Art Deco set which reminded me of the bar from The Shining for some reason and Michael Sheen as the galaxy’s most perfect bartender is phenomenal at playing the genial automaton. There are also shades of Titanic as Jim is a working class guy with proletarian accommodations below deck while Aurora, the daughter of privilege, is Gold Class with access to superior food and creature comforts. Wrapped in Thomas Newman’s scintillating score, Passengers is a campy delight. Remove the spaceship and the story is quite simple, but I cannot stop thinking about it. If people take the time to dissect it, they might be surprised at how happy they are when Jim wakes up Aurora, even though, it is a philosophical death sentence. You savages.
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