There is a blazing light at the center of the interplanetary romance “Passengers,” and its name is Jennifer Lawrence. In a love story whose attempt to be an interstellar “Titanic” eventually falls flat, Ms. Lawrence’s character, Aurora, is an ambitious journalist aboard the Avalon, a commercial spacecraft making a historic 120-year voyage. Its destination is Homestead II, a pioneer colony of an overcrowded Earth. The spunky, whip-smart Aurora, who bought a round-trip ticket, hopes to write the first book about Homestead II upon her return to New York.
But when Aurora is prematurely roused from a state of suspended animation, her hopes are dashed. Her awakener, Jim (Chris Pratt), is a hunky mechanical engineer who is jolted back to consciousness when an asteroid hits the Avalon and is aghast to find himself alone. Realizing that he faces 90 years of solitude on the spacecraft, can’t return to his hibernation pod and will never live to reach his destination, he begins to fall apart.
Spotting the recumbent Aurora, radiant in her pod, he savors her beauty, admires her thumbnail biography and falls in love. Against his better moral judgment, he revives her. Once outside her pod, Aurora is devastated to learn that she, like Jim, will almost certainly die en route to Homestead II.
But soon Jim and Aurora embark on a romantic courtship and quickly fall in love. Given their beauty, that may not sound bad until you consider their future in joint isolation with nothing to do but eat, drink, make love and play shadow games with holograms.
At its most gripping, “Passengers,” directed by Morten Tyldum (“The Imitation Game”) from a screenplay by Jon Spaihts (a collaborator on the scripts for “The Darkest Hour,” “Prometheus” and “Doctor Strange”), conveys the panic and despair of finding yourself trapped in a luxurious corporate prison in the middle of nowhere. Solitary confinement, even amid opulence, is solitary torture.
Even after “Passengers” ends, this creepy premise haunts your imagination. And the contrast between the chilly impersonality of the Avalon and the anguish of its human cargo lends the first half of the movie a desperate poignancy. Were I in Jim’s shoes, I would also drown my sorrows nightly the way he does at the well-stocked bar tended by a friendly android, Arthur (an amusing Michael Sheen).
A preview of the film.
By SONY PICTURES on Publish DateDecember 20, 2016. Image courtesy of Internet Video Archive.
Their idyll abruptly ends when Arthur spills the beans to Aurora about Jim’s role in her awakening, and she explodes in a stunning fit of fury that is the movie’s dramatic high point.
In its more relaxed first half, “Passengers” allows room for needling satire of the airline industry. Depending on the ticket price, the 5,000 passengers can expect different levels of service once they’re revived in the journey’s final four months. As a “gold star” passenger, Aurora is entitled to a sumptuous breakfast, while Jim has to settle for cold cereal. We also learn that the corporation behind this space travel is a very successful operation.
Before its midpoint, the film begins its retreat from the moral questions raised by Jim’s selfishly dragging Aurora into his personal hell. He may be handsome and charming and mechanically adept, but he’s rather dull and inarticulate with no defined personality.
Aurora and Jim are the latest embodiments of Hollywood’s ever-evolving ideal of young lovers. Both are white and beautiful, with the likable Mr. Pratt suggesting a new-and-improved perfect specimen of a familiar jock type. It is Ms. Lawrence’s feisty wonder woman who warms the movie with her sizzling volatility and intelligence.
But “Passengers” increasingly succumbs to timidity and begins shrinking into a bland science-fiction adventure whose feats of daring and skill feel stale and secondhand.
Things briefly improve when another accidentally reawakened passenger, Gus (Laurence Fishburne), appears, and helps the couple figure out what’s wrong with the ship. But because his character is dying, his appearance amounts to little more than an extended cameo. It seems the asteroid strike set off the Avalon’s slow breakdown, and it is up to Jim, with Aurora’s help, to set things right, save them, and in the process redeem himself in her eyes.
3COMMENTS
In its haste to tie up loose ends as efficiently as possible, “Passengers” becomes a banal, formulaic pastiche of dozens of other like-minded space operas in which the human drama gives way to technological awe. And Ms. Lawrence’s light softens to a 40-watt glow. Except for one special effect, its action scenes are anything but awesome. None are more disappointing than the couple’s perfunctory, suspense-free spacewalks.
The one exception is a scene in which the gravity aboard the ship suddenly fails. Aurora is swimming when the water in the pool suddenly rises and she risks drowning inside an aquatic plume. Such delicious moments of movie magic are in painfully short supply.
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