Passengers (2016)

An accident on a colonization ship causes one man (Chris Pratt) to wake from suspended animation ninety years too early. Alone on a luxury liner, with no one to talk to, no hope of returning to stasis, no future, and in a state of suicidal despair, he begins to obsess about one of the sleeping passengers, an exquisite women (Jennifer Lawrence).

Passengers is a beautiful picture, with a space ship that looks both familiar and like something new, and shot after shot elicited my attention. It presents us with a real character and a twisting moral issue packed with enough philosophical levels for a Russian novel. And it is happy to take its time, focusing on emotion. It does what fantasy and science fiction do best, takes a question or idea out of reality and lets us examine it under circumstances that frees us from the preconceptions of the world. It has everything to be brilliant.

But Passengers isn’t that type of picture. It isn’t trying to be brilliant. It doesn’t want to delve too deeply into the morass it has created. It doesn’t want to be Crime and Punishment. It wants to be a middle-of-the-road, pleasant Hollywood picture. And I suppose it succeeds with that, although with such modest goals, it should have had a far more modest first third. You don’t rip into emotional need and loss and ethical conundrums if you want to make fluff. It comes out just a bit awkward.

It all flows along nicely and kept me engaged. Chris Pratt is perfect in the role of the imperfect man and this is the best I’ve ever seen Jennifer Lawrence. They’ve got chemistry together, and apart (really, that makes sense) and I was with them all the way. Well, all the way until the filmmakers took the easy way out and let plot nudge aside all that pesky character and theme. I sympathize with the studio, wanting something to happen in their film. There’d been close to nothing happening for an hour and a half. I understand their desire to stick something in, and something that also saves them from dealing with what they’d created. But it is a shame. Plot was unnecessary. If they’d taken the film in any of several places they could have—should have—I’d be talking about Passengers as the best film of the year. I’d be speaking of the daring. But instead the whole thing weighs in like a feather. One could (and quite a few have) take offense, but that is giving the film more credit than it deserves. Passengers could have been truly offensive, and that would have been interesting. But we don’t get interesting. We get thoughtful science fiction until the filmmakers yell out, “Enough of that; let’s just stop right where we are and blow something up.” From there it is predictable sci-fi action (very predictable—you know exactly what is going to happen at each beat).

Which isn’t to say it’s a bad time. There’s enough in the first two-thirds for me to fork over my dollars for a ticket. However, not only should it have been more, it absolutely needed to be more.