Passengers is set on a cruise ship in space. Do you think cruise ships are fun? Exactly.
The cruise ship in the film is called the Starship Avalon but it’s also-metaphor alert-an apt metaphor for the film itself. A cruise ship is made for short term enjoyment. It looks good, and if you don’t think about it, sailing on a floating skyscraper can be a wonderful time (I did it a decade ago, enjoyed it). But scratch even a minuscule layer beneath the shiny exterior, and what you see it terrible. Everything is phony, or gross, or bacteria infected; the labor conditions are miserable and the sewage, well, it’s just a mess. It’s made to pass as classy for a few days, but at closer look, it’s all sheen; remnants of the gilded age, shiny on the outside but hollow on the inside. You get the point.
That metaphor may be a bit too pronounced, but that just makes it all the more fitting for Passengers.
Passengers is the story of two people awake on a cruise ship, alone. The ship is carrying 5000 passengers to a colonial planet. It’s a 120 year journey, but only 30 years in, Chris Pratt is woken from his hypersleep pod by a malfunction in the ship. With no way to communicate with earth, and no way to wake the crew, he is destined to live a life alone on what amounts to an interstellar cruise ship (the passengers expect to live 4 months on the ship awake, as they approach their final destination, hence the amenities).
The second passenger aroused from hypersleep is Jennifer Lawrence. Her character’s name is Aurora, by the way. And Pratt’s is Jim. But these don’t mean anything. This is a showcase for Acting, and we watch actors Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence act in scenes written for Superstars to Deliver to the Audience. Not some mechanic named Jim or a journalist named Aurora (and seriously, Aurora? C’mon. You’re working too hard).
It’s a malfunction that wakes Pratt, but it’s Pratt that wakes Lawrence. After living for a year alone on the ship (truncated to a few scenes) with only the company of a cheery android bartender version of Michael Sheen, Pratt finally breaks down and wakes up his companion. Pratt is lonely. We see him enjoy himself for a few days, playing “Dance, Dance, Revolution” and basketball by himself. But soon enough, he’s walking naked and drunk through the ship with a scraggly, long beard. So he wakes her up, and falls in love.
His selection of Lawrence is played as serendipitous happenstance, but it’s hard to imagine that Pratt didn’t solemnly walk the aisles of those 5000 passengers, window shopping for a woman he’d like to share his death sentence with.
The decision to wake Lawrence, to summon her to life and thus sentence her to death on the ship, is the emotional center of Passengers. The relationship between Lawrence and Pratt is shallow and predictable, as is everything about Passengers, but it’s not without occasional power. The actors both Act their Hearts Out, and Lawrence especially does some moving work when she learns how she came into her new life.
But Passengers just isn’t sophisticated enough to really attack the complexity of its concept. When Chris Pratt wakes Jennifer Lawrence, before she knows he woke her, they fall in love in, and it is….what? Sweet? Disgusting? A crime? Later, Lawrence is mad at him; he’s sorry. Okay. Angry and sad are about as far as Tyldum’s direction is capable of diving on this question, but it’s crucial: What exactly did Pratt do when he woke her up? Is this a romance in the stars or Stockholm Syndrome?
The question of motives is hard to push very far in Passengers, largely because of casting. Pratt is earnest and goofy and likable as always, and even he begs himself not to wake up Lawrence. But only for a minute because there are things to blow up. So we are only teased with the horrors of life on a cruise ship before Tyldum ill-advisedly turns Passengers into an action movie / farce in space. Suffice it to say that the improbability of the final third of the movie is matched only by Tyldum’s capacity to suck the drama from its unfolding.
Obvious from the start is that there is a successful film to be made from the raw material that is Passengers. The concept works: woken too early on a 120 journey, alone with nowhere to go. Screenwriter Jon Spaihts admitted that his initial interest was in the concept of a man alone in space. But when Pratt and Lawrence signed on, Passengers became a different animal. Said Spaihts: “We might have done things differently if our stars were less famous.”
That fact is present at all times in Passengers. Everything that happens seems like a showcase for the talents of these movie stars. Of course, that’s not all bad when your stars are Pratt and Lawrence. But it’s a problem if your goal is telling a decent story. And it’s a problem that Morten Tyldum had in last year’s Imitation Game as well. Imitation Game was just as interested in being a serious film for consideration as it was in actually working as a movie. Like Imitation Game, Passengers is a failure that might have worked. But that would have required passing on two of the most famous actors alive and opting for a story more interested in pursuing depth instead of quips and action.
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