Long Space Journey Into Night: PASSENGERS

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.

Turing the Tide: THE IMITATION GAME

The Imitation Game runs through its biopic paces, reducing a Great Man’s life into a series of easily digestible Big Moments. That the true story it tells is of Alan Turing, a gay man whose life’s work had gone underreported because of prejudice, and because his crucial scientific breakthroughs partially responsible for defeating Hitler remained classified, lends it a degree of importance. Although, given the subject’s wide reporting since files were declassified, it’s not exactly breaking new research ground here. Besides, it’s a movie, one intended to interpret a good story into a satisfying entertainment at that. It’s a World War II picture about people crunching numbers on the home front that’s quietly amazed the war was won, at least in the intelligence arena, by a gay man, a woman, and a roomful of math whizzes.

Graham Moore’s screenplay moves along three parallel tracks. It follows young Turing (Alex Lawther), bullied at boarding school and dealing with the first glimmers of his genius and romantic stirrings. It follows a detective (Rory Kinnear) in the 1950s puzzling out Turing’s secrets. The track is destined to end in tragedy when Turing is outed and charged with indecency in accordance to UK law at the time. These fill in the biopic obligations, giving us childhood context and his sad end, but the most exciting track is the WWII stuff. There director Morten Tyldum makes a brisk historical thriller in which Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) is tasked with cracking the Nazi Enigma code with a team of mathematicians, cryptographers, and spies (Matthew Goode, Charles Dance, Mark Strong). He recruits some fellow number crunchers, chief among them a brilliant young woman (Keira Knightley) kept out of the official inner circle by sexism.

It’s the kind of sanctimonious based-on-a-true-story film that’s pretty proud of itself for its historical importance, so much so the characters sound like they’ve already read the history books about their lives. It’s full of people simplifying and speechifying for our benefit, extolling the virtues of the Turing Machine while sneering at those who think it’s a waste of money as if it should’ve been obvious in the moment the future importance of the project. Elsewhere, characters say things like, “You can’t say you’re gay, Turing. That’s illegal.” Surely there’s a more subtle or elegant way of getting that information out there. It’s an overdose of explanation.

Turing narrates the entire picture, explaining the context of various incidents in his life, a way of getting inside the head of a character portrayed here as so full of egghead eccentricities he might as well have wandered in off the set of The Big Bang Theory. But a late scene reveals the voice over is a monologue he’s giving to a detective. Why he’d tell his life story there is beyond me. Maybe he’s filibustering. Cumberbatch delivers a clamped down performance so full of ticks and tricks that it’s scarcely believable as a real person. He’s a collection of biographical details never convincingly brought to life, perfect for a movie more interested in Big Moments and important monologues than building characters or crafting a gripping yarn.

But when the movie relaxes its need to explain the importance of its moment in history while following the build-a-biopic kit step by step, there’s some fine acting and some nervous tick-tock energy in its construction. Small moments of human interaction and wartime strategizing are often engaging. The actors are accomplished and, lead performance aside, have warm and lively likable energy. Knightley is the standout here, as a woman with a brilliant mind held back by a patriarchal system out to devalue her. When she shows up to apply for the job, she’s nearly turned away by a man who assumes she’s a lost secretary. Her sunny charm and intelligence give her scenes a heartbeat, much like Goode, Strong, and Dance (a good name for a Broadway law firm, by the way) breath sly grumpiness into stuffy writing.

Turing’s story is interesting, but the movie made out of it is inert, insisting on its own importance with a glossy, technically proficient surface that refuses to engage with the genuinely fascinating ideas inherent underneath. There are some pleasing elements, with a good cast working hard, craftspeople making fine period detail, and a typically excellent Alexandre Desplat score. It’s of minor interest for Anglophiles and WWII buffs, I suppose, but for starting with a tale so dramatic the end result is surprisingly empty.