Who’s hot right now? Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence. What seems to be the “in” thing? Space films. What always gets bums in seats around the holidays? A good love story. Smash it all together like the most obvious thing imaginable, and you’ve got a recipe for a very good blockbuster, right?
It all seems so simple. TITANIC, in space. I’d watch that, sounds great. Unfortunately Morten Tyldum, fresh off the success of THE IMITATION GAME, and writer John Spaights (PROMETHEUS) don’t serve that up. Instead, we are thrown a curveball that skews the entire film and then seems to leave it all in no mans land, unsure of what it wants to be. The “twist” has been widely reported on but if you missed it, or don’t want to know what happens, and just want to know if it’s worth seeing, I’m afraid its a no from me. I found it dull, a little cold and the story was both too safe, and at the same time overly daft like it had pretensions of being a complex tale. A few cool scenes dotted in, its not bad to look at and Lawrence and Pratt are watchable enough aside from some truly dreadful dialogue, but it falls apart completely after a promising opening act and never recovers. 2 Lego studs, maybe catch it on Netflix sometime if you want some really throwaway sci-fi stuff.
However, I do have a little more to say on this about what makes it so disappointing, and its all spoiler talk so if you’ve seen it, or aren’t bothered, here we go.
* *literally all the spoilers **
So my big issue is that the filmmakers either didn’t have the balls, or probably weren’t allowed, to really go deep into Jim’s decision to wake Aurora up (prize for laziest naming of a main character, 2016). Instead of exploring this really interesting idea, (what would you do in Jim’s situation?) they half-ass it and try to do a regular Hollywood love story, which means people coming for a romantic film are alienated by the creepiness of his stalking, and anyone here looking for some decent sci-fi feel cheated because they don’t ever go anywhere with it.
Its been covered more extensively elsewhere, but Jim’s decision is fucked up. Not only his choice, but the year long stalking of Aurora, having breakfast beside her while she sleeps, going through her videos, then playing pretend and acting like he’s a hero who is there to help her because he was woken up too. Its criminal that the end result of this, when Aurora finds out, after another year of banging in front of nebula filled vistas, is that it basically dissipates away because she has space Stockholm syndrome. She doesn’t so much forgive him, more the film just kinda needs to wrap it up and finish on its love story ending. Aside from one really dodgy scene of a voyeuristic Jim trying to confess as he watches her sprint round the ship, a physical demonstration of her unable to escape this creepy bastard, its never properly discussed or given the attention it deserves.
Until Lawrence Fishburne turns up. Oh yeah, he’s in this. As a walking exposition dump, who promptly dies after giving them enough information, and a login, for Jim to fix it. Fishburne’s character isn’t dumb, he quickly figures out that Jim screwed with Aurora’s pod and doomed her to life imprisoned among the ship, yet all we get from him is “still…damn.” That’s the extent of his reaction to this. Later, Aurora, exasperated at just how big a pair of dickheads shes stuck with, screams that what Jim did was tantamount to murder, with Fishburne all but becoming a shrugging emoticon.
There’s simple ways to fix this, even with the half-baked approach they went with (have Jim die, then Aurora is alone and has the same choice he did), but it would’ve been great to get a proper psychological thriller out of it. Perhaps we don’t see the twist, we wake up with Aurora and view the film through her eyes, we watch Jim get creepier and more twisted up until the reveal, making the entire thing more impactful. Perhaps she discovers hes done this before to other women he became obsessed with, finds their bodies and we get a white-knuckle fight for survival until she kills him, only to then suffer the same loneliness herself. You know, something actually engaging and interesting.
There were numerous things that were dumb or cliched, but that was my biggest gripe. I cant even put it on the actors. While I understand the idea that a less naturally lovable actor than Pratt could’ve sold the creepiness of Jim better, actually having a leading man with that charm, and then playing off it and making the audience hate him against their instincts would be such a brilliant thing to watch.
Other than the entire story being poor, Aurora mashing all the buttons, including one saying “stem cells”, on a medical pod (and of course there’s only one med-pod) to magically revive Jim, who’s been dead a minimum of 15 minutes from oxygen deprivation deserves a special mention, as does the line Aurora gives Michael Sheen’s robot butler, Arthur, when discussing how Jim is a prick:
Arthur – “You know, I hear time heals all wounds.”
Aurora – “Broken hearts are aren’t quite that simple.”
Urrrggghhhhhhh.
Killed by its terrible writing, PASSENGERS is unfortunately a huge missed opportunity for anyone expecting either a good romance film, or an interesting sci-fi flick. Cool looking spaceship, though.
that lego guy 