As flops go, it’s a Beauty
Passengers Cert 12A Collateral Beauty Cert 12A
HOLLYWOOD’S hottest stars make cosmic love in this glossy sci-fi romance.
On paper this looks like a winner. Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt are talented and attractive with a record of blockbuster successes.
The huge budget allows for some top-drawer special effects and it has an intriguing story.
Shame it’s such a mess – morally dubious and often dull.
Pratt plays a mechanic called Jim who is in suspended animation with 5,000 others on a spaceship heading to colonise a new world.
His sleep pod malfunctions and he wakes up to find his journey still has 90 years to go. W With only an android fo for company, played b by t he brilliant Michael Sheen, Jim falls in love with Jennifer Lawrence’s sleeping beauty, called Aurora. After many vigils gazing at her in her glass pod he decides to wake her, knowing she will not survive the voyage.
He blames the ship. The film portrays it as an act of love, not selfishness. Jim is rewarded with space nookie as she finds his goofy yet capable man-child irresistible.
It turns out she is an irritating investigative journalist with daddy issues. Just like in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the robot is the most sympathetic character.
The design and CGI are fabulous and there are interesting nods to Stanley Kubrick classics 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining.
But the film abandons its early attempts at psychological horror to play the romcom card before becoming an action movie with some dull peril and explosions.
Being lost in space for 90 years together is the least this pair deserve. You have to feel sorry for the android, though.