Don't Beam Me Up! Passengers is a Passive and Uninspired Intergalactic Bore

Sparks flying between Aurora (Lawrence) & Jim (Pratt)? Nope. That's a negative.

 Passengers is a Passive & Uninspired Intergalactic Bore

 

Ahhhh, space, the final frontier. Passengers, released in theatres December 2016,  has a Disney World Tomorrowland idea of the future that awaits us. The story opens in a glossy, white, glowing spaceship, (as if there is ever anything else) known as Starship Avalon. The luxury liner is full of state-of-the-art holograms, legions of cool-voiced artificial intelligence women and men, and high tech gadgets, gizmos, panels and doodads. It’s as though director Morten Tyldum scribbled down everything that came to mind for an outerspace journey and just hurled it all into the movie. Everything about this has been seen before: from the little robots zooming around the decks, to the recreational spots around the ship (a DDR video game, and basketball court that screams rave club) that attempt to show off how marvelous and DAZZLING things are. How oh so advanced, YET relatable the characters are compared to us. Passengers has an “everything-but-the-kitchen-sink feel to it” all the tropes and cliches are pooled together to congeal into one massive been-there-done-that, movie.

Passenger’s plot is sensible enough: over 5,000 earthens have decided to peace out from Earth, which is overcrowded and “overrated”, and travel at the speed of light to get to Homestead II-- a kind of cosmic colony and new beginning. This theme is beaten within an inch of its life long before the two hours of this movie have elapsed. Buckle in and be ready for a loooooong ride., The story begins 90 years before the Avalon is set to land on Homestead II when the stasis pod holding hypersleeping passenger Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) malfunctions.This not so little hiccup in the ship’s programming wakes up the aspiring engineer and leaves him to wander throughout the vacant corridors. 

Jolly good pint, Jeeves. Anthony (Sheen) serves Jim.

At first bewildered by the sights before him, as a year passes Jim grows resentful of his captivity. With a bushy brown beard and whiskey bottles perpetually in his hands, Pratt’s character Jim divides his time between either knocking back drinks at the bar with the android bartender Anthony (Michael Sheen), half-heartedly tinkering with technology (and growling at it. Often.) and most of all, creeping on another cryogenically sleeping passenger that he noticed by chance one day: a pretty blonde journalist and writer named Aurora Lane (Jennifer Lawrence).

Jim streams all her videologs and reads all her articles on his tablet, and when he’s done obsessively cramming his brain with all things Aurora, he sets up camp next to her glass pod and watches her sleeping and has one sided conversations with her. But too bad flirting with her comatose figure loses its novelty fast.The thirsty bachelor can’t take no more alone time, and instead uses his tech savvy skills to fry the circuits of Aurora’s pod and wake her up. Now with a missus by his side to keep him company to his dying day, the two can tra-la-la-la their way to an enchanting last hurrah great romance. We get montages of playful splashing in the pool, movie nights, and gourmet dinners, interspersed with generic steamy sex scenes. They flirt and smooch and romp around the ship. Sure Pratt and Lawrence cling together like two socks from a dryer all charged up with static electricity but they have about as much chemistry together as a thimble. The script is weak and unimpressive with clunky lines like: "For the first time in my life I don't feel alone. We weren’t supposed to find each other but we did. It makes me feel like my life isn't over, it's just beginning."

 

Aurora is composing some more Eat, Pray, Love-isms in her head right now.

And: "Jim and I live in accidental happiness, like cast-aways making their home on strange shores."

Things take a dark turn for the two lovebirds when the truth comes out. An evening of tossing back shots at the bar goes south when Android Anthony (Sheen), beaming a mega-watt smile, tells Aurora that Jim woke her up. Livid and howling, Aurora thunders out of the room and rages in her quarters. The fury of her sobbing is ten times the intensity of her bawling as Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games which means here it doesn’t just look completely ridiculous and like it’s straight out of a soap opera, but it’s downright comical. It’s hard to feel for this girl when her entire performance consists of her jogging her perfectly tousled little blond self around the ship exercising, or spouting Eat, Pray, Love cliches while she embarks on a writing journey to chronicle her (and Jim’s) early awakening and how they’re living their days (sex! pool! both!) After much blubbering and screeching, she breaks into Jim's quarters and starts pounding the hell out of Jim, and even almost goes all Kathy Bates in Misery when she swings a sledgehammer at him. Aurora’s melt-down isn’t enough to carry the story, so we get the big bad news: the Avalon is having some serious technological failures. What was supposed to be an infallible, indestructible, transport vehicle to a new world instead is zooming around space on the verge of going ka-boom, and exploding everyone and everything in it to bits.

Three words: the morning after

About an hour and fifteen minutes into Passengers when finally get a new character: the Captain of the Avalon, Gus Mancuso (Laurence Fishburne), who's stasis pod breaks down. Bewildered, Gus shuffles around the ship and reports that everything on the ship is failing. The technology is on the fritz, and parts of the engine are broken beyond repair because of meteor damage (and other outerspacey, intergalactic, hazards). This dire discovery plays as a way to get Jim and Aurora to reconcile; to strike up that (bland) desire between them, and show us their desperate, syrupy love. 

The grim Captain doesn’t have more than fifteen minutes or so of screen time before he oh so tragically, and oh so conveniently dies from organ failure, after he oh so helpfully gets the two passengers understand and forgive each other. So Aurora and Jim get the green light to resume their Noah’s Ark romance and everything is easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy. Except for how the ship is still going down. Some of the most visually entertaining parts happen during this breakdown. We get a breakfast bar that goes berserk and pelts J. Law with cheerios, and we get gravity loss that sends Jim spiraling helpless around his room and simultaneously encapsulates Aurora in the blob of water that is the pool without gravity. In much blander scenes we also get to see Jim suit up and tether himself to a cable so he could bob around outside the ship and star gaze, and inevitably “sacrifice” himself in one “epic” last ditch effort to expel some burning wreckage from the Avalon.

C'mon, what are the chances of this ACTUALLY ending in fire and brimstone?

 Passengers bills itself as deeply romantic journey and action tale, but instead it is a passive and uninspired intergalactic bore. Passengers has some of the most cardboard dialogue I’ve heard in a movie, and features two protagonists who are not fleshed out or likable enough to believe in in the first place, let alone to root for them. The love is shallow and unrealistic and the sentiments Aurora and Jim share are about the same quality as a sappy, mass-produced, Hallmark card. It’s a dreadful shame that talented actor Chris Pratt didn’t bring an ounce of his charisma or comedic chops to this role. The visuals and special effects are lackluster and derivative-- the design of the stasis pods are just about lifted directly from 1979’s Alien and there’s not one single thing that deviates from the stereotypically high-tech, glowing-white, space ship that we’ve all seen on screens times and time again. This entire film is polished, but it’s hollow and unsatisfying and a complete waste of two hours. The wish-fulfillment happy ending reeks of Nicholas Sparks level desperation and trueeeee-loooove, is as flimsy as the movie is forgettable. 

All images from the IMDB