Space tale departs on journey to nowhere
There are plenty of pleasing things to look at, but a promising first half morphs into action scenes that don’t fit
Great screen chemistry between Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence comes to nothing in Passengers, a sci-fi romance with all the right stuff — except good storytelling.
Details leading nowhere and various deus ex machina moments make the movie look as if it was tinkered with after test screenings, although it’s anyone’s guess as to just what happened.
Passengers is set entirely on the Avalon, a spaceship headed for a brave new world, a colony far from earth. The trip takes more than 100 years, and the emigrants are in a state of suspended animation until just prior to landing.
But something goes wrong. One man’s sleep pod malfunctions and he wakes up 90 years too early. A woman passenger is in the same fix, waking up long before it was intended.
The man is Jim Preston (Pratt), an engineer, so he is able to orient himself on the ship and figure out a few mechanical things. The woman, Aurora Lane (Lawrence) is the only other human awake, although she and Jim do have the company of an android bartender, played with plastic cheer by Michael Sheen.
Obviously, one man and one woman at the beginning of a whole new endeavour adds up to a sort of Adam and Eve story, and Passengers moves between scenes of falling in love and scenes of big adventure in space.
Filmmaker Morten Tyldum (Headhunters, The Imitation Game) makes space look seductive enough, but Passengers seem conflicted about its purpose. Is it a love story? Is it a space adventure? Is it a Greek tragedy? The first hour is full of promise and interesting detail, and at the heart of the story is a moral dilemma that’s both off-putting and fascinating to consider. Once love conquers all, however, Passengers seems to have nowhere to go — and that moral dilemma vanishes under the weight of danger-fuelled action scenes that don’t quite fit with everything that’s gone before.
Passengers is disappointing, but it’s by no means a writeoff. There are plenty of pleasing things to look at — including Lawrence and Pratt, who are both very good here — and the first part of the movie is entirely engaging.
There’s so much potential. What a shame it’s never realized.