Passengers Review
Passengers was a film I heard a lot about before its marketing campaign even started up. Every so often I’d hear about a new space thriller coming out with Jennifer Lawrence and Chis Pratt. The concept sounded very interesting to me. Morten Tyldum, who directed the Imitation Game, also headed this film. I wasn’t a huge fan of that movie but the plot details for this one kept me intrigued. My tone kind of shifted on Passengers once the trailer came out. It had a lot elements of a romantic comedy but at the same time a science fiction/action thriller. It just kind of confused me on what the film was going for. Regardless, I thought I’d give it a shot.
Right as the movie starts off and you’re introduced to the Chris Pratt character, Passengers is very similar to a live action Wall-E. It follows the same type of concept with a luxurious and futuristic space voyager cruise ship. The design of the ship was really well done and a lot of the specs and amenities that it had were pretty cool. I thought the little gadgets the station is stalked with created interesting moments and added a lot of humor to the beginning of the film. There’s a few examples of when the movie pokes fun at the extremely annoying and aggravating imperfection and glitches of advanced technology. For instance, Chris Pratt tries talking to the A.I. system about why he’s alone on the ship and the system can’t process or understand what he’s saying. They weren’t great but I still enjoyed them for what they were.
The beginning and setup is the biggest positive of the film for me. After that, it kind of hits a brick wall and never gets back on track. First off, the trailer gave away too many plot details and that ruined a lot of it for me because I knew what was coming next. The main issue is that the movie feels very generic and in general I didn’t care too much about the characters or what was going to happen to them. Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence’s chemistry was not very good. I feel like its one of those movies that you can walk away from for like half an hour and still come back and understand what’s happening. The middle section doesn’t really drag but nothing very interesting happens and it seems to play the same beats over and over.
Aside from that, there’s some plot details that the characters aren’t aware of for sections of the film that I felt they could have easily made the right assumptions about. There is a major emotional turn made at the end that happened way to quickly in my opinion for it to make a real impact. Lastly, all the loose ends left in the final act are answered and wrapped up in too convenient of a way. I think it would have been ok to do it with a few tings but not all of them.
Passengers was very much what I expected. I was happy to see that it didn’t have too many clashing tones like the trailer made it look like. Unfortunately, it mainly suffers from being completely serviceable but pretty boring as well. I definitely wouldn’t rush out to see it but you may want to check it out on streaming whenever it comes out. I give it 5/10.
