*spoilers to follow*
After watching the trailer, you may think Passengers is some version of a sci-fi thriller with a tinge of romance. Just imagine the potential storylines: 2 strangers wake up 90 years too soon on their interstellar trip to a new planet, and with no way to fall back asleep, fall in love instead. However, the same glitch in the system that brought them together makes a reappearance in a big way, cutting their honeymoon phase a little short. Sounds like an interesting and promising premise right? Well it did to me at least, but perhaps 25 minutes into the movie, I realized the trailer had skipped a bit of an important detail. But first, let’s set the scene.
Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) awakes to the cool and collected voice of a hostess hologram who guides him through his post-hibernation confusion. He is aboard the Avalon, she calmly reminds him, en route to his new home, Homestead II. Remembering the promise of a fresh start on the new planet, Jim settles down in his living quarters aboard the luxury space liner, preparing to meet his 5000 fellow colonists whom he’d be spending the next 4 months in transit with before landing on Homestead II. Soon after visiting an orientation with no other humans in attendance, Jim comes to understand that he is the only passenger awake due to a bit of an early wake-up call. 90 years too early.
We then sadly watch as Jim puts up every effort to fix his situation. He approaches the ship’s many computers, only to find out that they simply cannot process the reality of a hibernation pod failure. He sets out to find a crew member but is greeted with a pretty much everything-resistant (flame, bullets, Jim’s hopeless fists, you name it!) metal barrier separating him from the slumbering crew and basically any way to seek help. He then triumphantly locates a laser message system that can send his pleas to Earth, promising him a reply in a timely 55 years for the small cost of $6 012!
From there on, taking the advice of a chipper android bartender (Michael Sheen) programmed to spout cliche life advice and polish beer glasses for the rest of eternity, Jim decides to take each day as it comes and make the best out of his situation. Being a mechanic, he is able to upgrade (break in) to a luxurious penthouse suite where he spends all of his time that is not utilized dance battling holograms, shooting hoops, or dining at the ship’s multi-faceted robot operated restaurant. However, he then realizes that life kind of sucks if your only friend is a robot bartender and enters a bit of a depressive episode to cope with his utterly consuming loneliness. Although of course we all feel for poor Jim, at this point, everyone is raising eyebrows because surely Jennifer Lawrence’s character ought to experience a hibernation pod malfunction right about now and save the day, right?
Err…kind of? J-law shows up alright, but not in the way you’d expect (or feel comfortable with). After a close call with a suicide attempt, Jim chances upon the beautiful writer and journalist extraordinaire, Aurora Lane (Jennifer Lawrence), asleep in her pod. Fascinated, he researches the ship’s archives and after watching a series of video interviews conducted by the staff and reading countless pieces of her work, Jim falls for a woman he has never met, whom he is certain is his soulmate. After having a not-so-convincing moral dilemma surrounding essentially taking away someone’s entire life for his own selfish needs, Jim quickly and easily figures out how to wake Aurora up from hibernation.
Let it be known, I was determined not to give up on the story line just yet. Yes, it wasn’t what I expected, and yes, I had to control my brain from kicking into full-feminist gear, but I was still hopeful that they could make the plot into something interesting. Maybe not comfortable or pleasant, but surely something gripping and intense that played on the weaknesses and flaws that isolation is capable of uncovering. Yeah, that didn’t happen. Instead, I watched as Aurora unknowingly fell for the man who single-handedly ruined any hopes of a future because he was lonely and thought she was pretty.
Of course, later on in the film, Aurora finds out what Jim had done and she is understandably quite enraged. As Aurora struggled with feelings of betrayal, bewilderment, and deception, I got my hopes up again. I really appreciated that the movie emphasized that what Jim did, how he pick and chose her to accompany him on a 90 year meet cute, was unacceptable. In fact, one scene in which Jim tries to explain his motives and reasoning to Aurora over the ship intercom and she shuts him down, screaming “I don’t care what you want! I don’t care why you did it! You took my life!”, was very well thought out and I think excellently depicted what someone in her situation would be going through.
Unfortunately, this wonderful scene is a bit for naught when considering the conclusion of the story. After a bizarre Deus ex Machina situation courtesy of Laurence Fishburne and a series of jam-packed life or death interstellar action sequences, we’re back to square one with these two. After Jim saves the day and fulfills the ultimate “nice guy” trope, all talk about stealing lives and consent and condemnation is out the door and suddenly Aurora “can’t live without [him]”. All that matters now is that Chris Pratt risked his life to save the day and did so with nail-biting success. These near death experiences of course caused Aurora to reevaluate her feelings for Jim, finally deciding that he was worth spending the rest of her life with, despite a last second opportunity for her to go back into hibernation for the remaining 88 years.
Overall, despite its beautiful special effects and vivid depictions of the future of space travel, plot-wise, Passengers wasn’t up to the mark. To my mind, the cheesy outcome of the conclusion just wasn’t justifiable in a moral or plausible sense. All things considered, the Morten Tyldum (The Imitation Game) directed film was not terrible, but rather unfulfilling when pondering all of the potential, more enthralling story lines that could have branched off of the intriguing initial premise of being trapped between the vast expanses of space and the ever-nearing boundaries of time.