Passengers
My Grade: B-
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For the last few years around this time in the Fall/Winter we've gotten a good "hard-sc-fi" movie. Gravity, Interstellar, The Martian; and this year tried to continue the tradition but it sort of fumbles the ball even though it easily could have really done it with a stronger script, a better story and a different focus.
We're just going to get right into it, so there's spoilers abound though there's not a whole lot to spoil, the big "twist" in the movie comes pretty "early" and is already alluded to in the trailers and the arc of the story isn't all that complex or a surprise.
Jim (Chris Pratt) is a passenger aboard the interstellar cruise/colony ship Avalon transporting 5,000 passengers and 200-some crew to a corporate colony world evidently some 60 light years away from Earth, the occupants are put into hibernation while the ship makes its journey and are awoken a few months before arrival where they live in relative luxury after a 100+ year journey (Not accounting for time dilation/contraction which even at .5c isn't too meaningful) before settling onto the colony world Homestead II. It'd seem corporations have taken over space-travel and while it's apparently very successful and ambitious, as would be expected when we're talking about businesses, many passengers basically offer themselves into relative servitude to pay back their debt to the company for the trip. Sure it'd seem they're compensated for well and paid well, but they have a lifetime of debts added to by whatever things they buy while on the ship.
Anyway, we're told the various systems and such with the ship are flawless but apparently they're not (the ship welcomes passengers to witness a stellar event occurring outside when there's supposedly 90 years left in the journey. Yes our main characters are awake at this point but the ship's AI doesn't seem aware anything is wrong.) The ship encounters a meteor shower that overcomes its "deflector shields" and the damage causes the sleeper-pod containing Jim to malfunction and wake up 90 years too soon. He tries in futility to get back to sleep in the pod but they're built to sustain the hibernation, not to begin it. His passenger access doesn't allow him access to the ship's bridge or engine room -but does allow him access, apparently, to the cargo and maintenance areas-, sending an E-Mail costs him $6,000 and is expected to have a some 40-year round-trip transmission time but apparently while he can get indebted to the company to send a $6,000 E-Mail he can't go into debt in order to get cappuccino or decent meals out of the food dispensers.
Jim's not totally alone, he "befriends" the android bar-tender, perpetually polishing a glass, in The Shining like scenes where Jim pours his heart out and explains his feelings to the robotic bartender who can offer the minimal of platitudes for advice. Jim lives by himself for a year growing a beard and increasingly agitated and even comes close to throwing himself out an airlock as his depression grows. It's at this point he stumbles on the sleeping pod for Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence) and falls, well not in "love" exactly but she's a woman sleeping in a transparent pod in her underwear so take it from there. Jim uses the ship's computers to watch Aurora's videos, interviews and such and to read her writing and he begins to fall for her. It could probably be argued that seeing the equivalent of someone's social media page and reading their journalism isn't enough to fall in love on, but Jim does anyway and the begins to struggle with his inner demons. He has in his possession the QRG for the sleeping pods and he believes he could wake Aurora up for companionship, though he knows this means he'll doom her to his same fate. to die in space a half-century before anyone else wakes up.
He wrestles with the idea but not only decides to wake her up but also decided to keep it a secret from her that he did so, leading her to believe she was woken up by the same malfunctions that woke him up. They live together for several months, perhaps a further year, growing together once Aurora accepts that there's no way to get back to sleep or to send for help, the grow close to one another and on the night where Jim is apparently ready to propose to her (because marriage means anything in this circumstance?) the robotic bartender lets it slip on what Jim did, sending Aurora into a rage and she cuts herself off from Jim.
During all of this time the ship's been displaying a series of malfunctions that Jim in incapable of doing anything about and they only mount to a tension point where Jim and Aurora have to work to save the ship and the 5,000+ people still sleeping on it hoping to arrive at a new home in a few decades.
The biggest criticism about the movie comes from the actions of Jim, and on the surface it's easy to why. He does. for selfish reasons, wake a woman up -dooming her to death- for his own selfish needs (though human ones) and she does fall in love with him and sleep with him where it could be argued she only does so out of a form of Stockholm Syndrome; Jim is her "captor" and she has no choice *but* to fall for him.
But the way it plays out in the movie doesn't hold up; it's first clear to see that Jim struggles with the choice he makes and it doesn't come easy for him but it should also be easy to understand where he is coming from. He is lonely and possibly going mad. So, he wasn't in his "right mind" when he wakes Aurora up.
So what about afterwards? Well, again, it's easy to think Jim manipulates her and Stockholms her into falling for him but in the play of events in the movie he seems to let her come around to him on her own and only after enough time has passed for her to come to some order of peace with her predicament and even allowing her to make "the first move" towards Jim.
Yeah, it's still fucked up what he does but this is hardly equitable to, say, a man who kidnaps a woman and chains her up in his basement and psychologically abuses her until she's psychologically broken and feels she has no other choice *but* to fall for the man. Hell, the "relationship" between Belle and The Beast in "Beauty and the Beast" is creepier and closer to Stockholm syndrome than this, there the Beast is actually an active part in holding her captive and is psychologically abusing her to stay.
The problem is, it's a plot point the movie doesn't need. There's enough interesting things going on here that we didn't need the extra nugget of Jim waking up Aurora, the movie could have contrived that her pod eventually fails as well and while it can be argued how absurd that would be the movie does something just as absurd -if not more so- on its own. The movie spends a good amount of time in the climax with Jim and Aurora dealing with the failing systems on the ship and once everything seems to be "back in place" the move probably skips over what's the most interesting part of the story:
Jim and Aurora's life on the ship. Once the main crisis is over the movie flashes forward 88 years to when the rest of the ship is waking up to find what Jim and Aurora have "left behind" we get some narration from Aurora to the crew in the form of the book she was writing during her awake time.
The movie could have ditched the subterfuge sub-plot with Jim, minimized the space-threat subplot (because it runs counter to what we're told about the ship and the company's flawless record of making these space-runs, that apparently this was the one trip that almost didn't make it) and focused on the lives of these two characters.
Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence are some of the biggest names in Hollywood right now, two of the most charismatic actors working now and their screen presence and chemistry here is pretty much perfect. The movie, for me, got over the hurdle of dealing with Jim's actions but I don't think it ever quite achieves the greatness that's the potential here.
While I wouldn't say the movie is too short it does pretty much end right when the most interesting things are about to happen and when we see the results of Jim and Aurora's life together we missed a hell of a lot.
The visuals in the movie are great, the space scenes, the design and look of the ship, the technology in it all has the sleek, cool, space sci-fi stuff we can all love, but the movie's story mostly falls meh.
There's good visuals here in the form of space walks, and a anti-gravity scene while Aurora is swimming causing her to have to swim through an anti-gravity water blob floating over the pool's basin, and it's just easy to picture this ship being a "real" one.
But the movie just.... lacks.
I'd say it's worth seeing at some point but there's just a lot of missed opportunity here with this cast, the general premise and the overall look of the movie.
It focuses on the wrong thing and the main conflict could have been kept with the characters overcoming it to their lives together but the movie just plays it wrong. The movie plays quite a bit wrong.
