If you’re reading this, it means I’ve succeeded.
In warning you, that is, to steer clear of Passengers — a tepid and pat little rom-com dressed up in a spacesuit. It’s dumb, empty, and creepy, in a predatory-love-interest kind of way. I expected more (and less of the creepy).
The trailer makes this seem like a smart, slick, 2001-style alone-in-space mind-screw, a pair of gorgeous space travelers marooned on a ghost ship. It’s not, or at least not entirely. Instead, it’s a weird, cloying meet-cute, but one that lands squarely on the wrong side of such avant-garde issues as a woman’s right to choose (pretty much anything at all).
The Avalon is a giant spaceship bound for a colony world called Homestead II, and it’s on autopilot — the 258 crew and 5000 passengers are sound asleep in hibernation pods. Something happens and Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) wakes up some 90 years too early. As the interstellar cruise ship’s systems boot up around him — lights flicker on and automated greetings play — he finds himself all alone. The only man alive, so to speak.
With no one to keep him company but an android bartender (Michael Sheen, disappointing), Pratt struggles in vain to understand why he’s awoken so early. Unable to hibernate again, he passes time like the world’s most pampered cast-away, but soon sprouts a monster beard and begins a PG-rated slide into boredom. (Is it wrong that being alone on a space cruiser with limitless food, liquor, video games, gym access, movies, and reading materials and no work to do doesn’t sound too bad to me?)
Enter Aurora Lane (Jennifer Lawrence), a writer from New York who awakens to find herself an unwitting Eve to Pratt’s Adam.
The trailer paints this as cute, but all I can say is that in reality, it’s not.
A ball has been hidden, in that trailer. The ball is not a good ball. You will not want to play with this ball. This ball will make you feel upset.
Put it this way: If you’re facing decades in deep space with some dude, how would you like for him to be a coquettish schlub hell-bent on hooking up with you but never quite sure how to ask you out? How would you enjoy pacing around a closed vessel with the Last Man In The World, knowing you could NEVER, EVER GET AWAY and had to endure his pushy, rabbity, ham-fisted flirting for eternity until you either sleep with him or shoot yourself out an airlock? (This is supposed to come off like some sort of dream romance, but it seems more like a nightmare to me.)
This forced courtship admittedly plays rather better than it should, thanks to two congenial and very watchable leads. Pratt and Lawrence are fun and work well together, but no amount of romp-on-the-table chemistry can rescue this picture from the sheer emptiness of its story, or the deep unease attending its general premise.
The sci-fi element, which might have rehabilitated it some, is disappointing too. The ship looks pretty (on the outside, at least) and the human resettlement backstory is okay, but in the end that’s all there is. Director Morten Tyldum (The Imitation Game) should have known better. Efforts to build suspense (something’s wrong with the ship!) end up a confusing mess, a series of crises and climaxes coming out of nowhere and making no sense on their own terms; there are plot holes here the size of a Dark Nebula. If you stopped watching halfway through and brainstormed potential endings, I guarantee you’d think up something more exotic and interesting than did writer John Spaihts (Prometheus, Doctor Strange). There’s no real payoff.
In the end, this is a film that draws inspiration from many others — like Interstellar, Gravity, The Martian, 2001, Ender’s Game, and Sunshine, to name a few — but you’d do better watching literally any of those than searching for meaning here. What was billed as a cute Christmas sci-fi adventure with beautiful people is in actuality a nerd’s fantasy basement wank that you have to pay fourteen bucks to witness.
Pass.
Haus Verdict: Passengers plays coy with its central premise, which once revealed drops a thick rotten deuce on the whole story. If you take this trip, do what Lawrence should have done: Sleep through it.
Passengers opens December 21.
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