It’d be impressive how brainless Passengers is if it didn’t also come with an attendant sense of
overwhelming boredom. Here’s a movie that does the heavy lifting to establish a
concept with a modicum of compelling interest, then squanders it. Thirty years into
a century-long spaceflight, two passengers wake from hibernation. Unable to
return to suspended-animation – what with their pods malfunctioning and whatnot
– they’re simply trapped to live out the rest of their lives on a
cross-universe flight, doomed to die before even reaching the colony that was
their destination. Great, right? But the movie seems to care not a stitch about
the horror of the situation, nor does it particularly care that the central
location is a bland cavernous 2001-themed
shopping mall with a cruise ship aesthetic and stole its best ideas from WALL-E. Add to this an underlying creepiness
on the doomed voyage that the filmmakers mistook for romanticism – Titanic this ain’t – and I started to
get almost grateful that the movie was so devoid of interest. It lulled me to
sleep with its stupidity and no amount of gleaming sci-fi gewgaws or flattering
shots of attractive movie stars could hold my attention.
The movie stars in question are Chris Pratt and Jennifer
Lawrence, here playing future people who were eager to sleep off a hundred
years and wake up colonists on a new planet. What would make a person agree to
such a momentous prospect? The movie’s eager to shrug it off to get to the
smooching. Normally I wouldn’t be opposed to such a task, especially in a movie
built around two actors who we know will end up together for no other reason
than because they’re the only two around. (Well, there is an android bartender
played by Michael Sheen, but the movie’s not that nutty.) Consider the circumstances that bring them together.
Pratt’s pod malfunctions, so he’s left the only waking life on the ship. He
wanders around like this for a year, getting beardy, bedraggled, and deeply
lonely. (Think Forte’s wildest moments in Last
Man on Earth filtered down to the lowest shiny studio denominator.) It’s
then that Pratt decides to open up another pod, the prettiest lady in
hibernation thus summoned to be his playmate. He hides this fact from her, of
course, thereby enabling a castaway romance the movie wants us to root for.
If you can stomach such a rocky foundation for a
relationship, you can enjoy these two pretty people swimming, playing
basketball, going on picnics, drinking in a bar like The Shining’s complete with the aforementioned unreal barkeep,
talking to robots, plundering the ships stores of food, and making gauzy
backlit tastefully PG-13 love. We’re supposed to feel the isolation as
harrowing and cozy in the same moment, a romantic getaway for two surrounded by
the howling void of galactic expanses. In one of the movie’s worst moments, as
the couple fights, Pratt (all charm before it curdles to smarm) mentions giving
Lawrence (flat and unconvincing, except for her perfume-ad poses in a tight
white bikini) some space. “Space is the last
thing I need,” she groans, while we silently wait out the dead air left
around this cornball laugh line. Still, the movie does acknowledge their
untenable situation from time to time, especially as the ship’s malfunctions
escalate, increasingly threatening to put a quick end to their good times. That
is, if she doesn’t discover the truth first.
Here’s where I started idly wondering if Jon Spaiths' script was just
told from the wrong perspective. Instead of spending a year with Pratt before
he wakes Lawrence from her sci-fi slumber – thereby stealing her future, and
thus, in effect, murdering her – what if we woke up with her? She’d be told
their pods malfunctioned, deal with her suddenly rewritten future, grapple with
knowledge she’ll die alone in space, and slowly get drawn into a romantic
entanglement with the only warm body around. Then – what a twist! a sick,
cruel, surprising twist! – she learns she’s been betrayed, and trapped with him
forever. Sounds better to me, but that’s premised on sorting out not only the
perspective, but the tone, approach, and the filmmaking’s smooth, polished,
nothings. The movie’s simply too bright and empty, even at its bleakest and
most complicated, to really dig into its implications. (It doesn’t even give
its stars cool future fashions, instead leaving them in boring leisure wear.) Director
Morten Tyldum (of the almost equally bland Imitation
Game) gives the whole thing an unreal sheen, too dutifully proficient to
cook up any real heat and too sedate to gin up any excitement. It’s so vacant a
production, not even a zero-g swimming pool calamity can get something going.
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