Review of Passengers (2016) by Nikolayg — 19 Mar 2017

Trust me, this movie is just not very good. It's not really sci-fi, not underneath all the superficial effects and the setting. In essence, it is the story of a woman who falls in love, falls out of love because she realizes she has been betrayed, and then forgives and falls back into love again. Ta da. That's it.

I enjoyed the opening shots before any characters were introduced. And it was interesting after the introduction of Chris Pratt for maybe 20 minutes, but definitely by the half hour point the story begins to drag and it keeps dragging until the very unrealistic ending. It's hard to explain why this movie is so dull without giving away spoilers, so let me do that. SPOILERS FOLLOW.

RIGHT NOW BELOW -- SPOILERS.

BIG TIME SPOILERS IMMEDIATELY FOLLOW.

Chris Pratt is in hibernation along with a bunch of other people, on a 120-year journey to a new planet that's been colonized. But a gigantic meteor hits the ship busting through its shields and damages the ship, causing his hibernation pod to malfuction. He wakes up 90 years too soon. He can't get the pod or any unoccupied pod to work to put himself back in suspended animation. He wanders around the gigantic ship entertaining himself with all of its fancy restaurants and amusement arcades, alone, and in the meanwhile falls in love with Jennifer Lawrence. You see all the pods have clear fronts, so you can see the person in them. He spots her in a pod. He reads up on her in the ship database. Falls more in love. And then, after a year of loneliness, he reads a manual about the pods and triggers hers so that she wakes up. Then he runs away quickly so she will think that her pod malfunctioned too. She wakes up and wanders around until she finds Chris Pratt.

They fall in love. But then she finds out that he woke her on purpose. She had thought her pod malfunctioned, too, like his. She screams at him. Hates him. Refuses ever to be in the same room with him. Prefers to be alone.

The rest of the movie is dedicated to her hating the only person she knows, then to him nearly dying trying to repair the ship (They find out what happened and that the ship is slowly falling apart) and as he drifts out into space having been working on fixing the ship from the outside, she suits up, flies out into space and by the skin of her teeth manages to rescue him. But when she gets him back inside, of course like Snow White, he appears to be dead. She grieves, realizing she will be alone the rest of her life. Then he opens his eyes. And now, of course, she loves him again more than ever.

So it's a story of someone falling in love, then being betrayed, then forgiving. Simple as that really underneath all the sci-fi fluff. The last act is dumb, and completely unrealistic, but I won't give it away. But man, I want to, because it is so ridiculous.

But with only two people and a robot bartender, and a brief appearance by a crew member who toward the end also wakes up, there is just not nearly enough material to fill 2 hours, not even close. This would have been a great half hour Twilight Zone episode. But a two-hour movie, no. If they were determined against good judgment to make a movie out of this slight story, they should have at least kept it to an hour and a half.