More becomes less in heavy-handed film
Passengers Run Time: 120 Minutes Starring: Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt Director: Morten Tyldum. THE cute meeting between Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt in Passengers isn’t so cute; it touches on messy ethical questions and matters of life and death.
As future-world earthlings en route to another planet, they’re supposed to be in a state of suspended animation, not awake and functioning and falling in love.
There is, at first, a thrilling what-if in Jon Spaihts’s screenplay, which concocts a sort of Titanic in outer space, with dollops of Sleeping Beauty and Gravity thrown in.
While Passengers offers a few shrewd observations about our increasingly techenabled, corporatised lives, its heavy-handed mix of life-ordeath exigencies and feel-good bromides finally feels like a case of more being less.
Subtlety is not Norwegian director Morten Tyldum’s strong suit. Even with striking visual design and seamless digital effects, he struggles to conjure an all-encompassing sense of wonder – and danger.
Among the quandaries that Passengers poses, the most terrifying might be: “What if you were trapped on a cruise ship for the rest of your life?” In this case the ship is the Avalon, an ultraautomated luxury interstellar airliner that’s ferrying 5000 paying passengers and 200-odd crew members, all enclosed in devices designed to keep them fresh and healthy and inanimate for the 120-year journey from Earth. At the other end of the trip is a new start on Homestead II, the antidote to overpopulated and overrated Earth.
For one passenger, mechanical engineer Jim Preston (Pratt), that new start offers a sense of purpose.
Jim is a salt-of-the-earth, old-school kind of guy. After a meteor hit causes a malfunction that releases Jim from his hibernation pod 90 years early, he finds himself wandering Avalon and seeking answers, in vain.
Unless he can find a way to return to his deep sleep, Jim will spend the rest of his life alone and die before reaching the promised land.
By the time a second passenger is prematurely up, Jim has become a boozy slob who’s contemplating suicide.
The other awakened passenger is writer Aurora Lane (Lawrence). Their rescue options exhausted, they embark on a proper courtship.
Her aim is to return to New York having written the first book about Homestead II.
The necessary fire is missing from their chemistry, until Aurora’s fury at discovering a crucial piece of information that Jim has been keeping from her. But both leads spring into convincingly treacherous action.
Given the imaginative set-up and the material’s provocative questions about mortality – not to mention the future of humankind – the movie’s neat lessons about the nature of happiness and a life well lived feel too easy, too obvious. – Hollywood Reporter