‘Passengers’ Refuses To Take The Road Less Traveled | Film Review

Have you ever sat down at a five-star restaurant and ordered the full seven course meal? Your appetizer astonishes, soup is amazing, bread created seemingly exclusively for your palette. Everything seems fantastic and right with the world. And then the main dish arrives, covered on one of those sterling silver serving trays. Your mouth waters, your anticipation magnifies, then the waiter lifts the lid to reveal…fried chicken.

That’s what Passengers is.

Director Morten Tyldum (The Imitation Game) weaves a gorgeous tapestry of cinematic splendor as he guides us through the Starship Avalon, a vessel taking over 5,000 passengers on a 120-year journey from Earth to a distant colony known as ‘Homestead II’. Every second of screen time is a visual playground for the senses as we traverse throughout each deck and ingest every technological advancement.

After a bump in the road, Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) finds himself awakened from his hibernation pod a scant 90 years early. After assessing his circumstances and contemplating galactic suicide, Jim stumbles upon Aurora Lane (Jennifer Lawrence), a writer now under the same predicament of interrupted slumber. Though the two are very different, kinship begets romance and before you know it, the most gorgeous couple on this ship find themselves in love and partaking in every inch of the ship’s seemingly endless amenities.

Unfortunately, one of them harbors a secret that could tear their relationship apart, all while the ship’s minor glitches begin to illustrate a far more dire situation than either of them could have ever imagined.

Let’s get the good news out of the way. As I said earlier, visually this movie is jaw-droppingly stunning. The set and art design are easily some of the finest work to come out of Hollywood this year. The sleek architecture allows Jim and Aurora to cascade throughout the ship almost as if they were eagles gliding from a mountaintop, showcasing the varied environments and special effects for the audience without once casting that sense of overabundance or excess commonplace in modern science-fiction films (I’m talking to you, Independence Day: Resurgence).

The acting is also top-notch and my issues with the film have absolutely nothing to do with the infinite charisma Chris Pratt draws randomly at-will, nor the obvious acting chops once again demonstrated by Meryl Streep’s successor, Jennifer Lawrence. Both characters, even at their worst, are instantly identifiable and relatable solely due to the talent of these two actors.

So with all of those awesome compliments, how can I call the film fried chicken when it sounds like filet? For the first 2/3 of Passengers, this is a great movie, plain and simple. The characters are engaging, the pacing is flowing, the direction vivid. The story takes a dark twist, and while some might call it despicable, I saw it as bold and original. It’s the kind of moment most mainstream films would rather toss in Vin Diesel than take a chance of this magnitude. But Passengers does it, and director Tyldum owns it. The cinephile in me began that Cheshire smile one gets when you see a Seven or Unusual Suspects-level of brashness coming at your senses. This meal was going to be delicious.

And then, fried chicken. I know what you’re thinking, ‘hey, I like fried chicken’. I’m with you, it’s tasty. It’s also something I’ve had about a thousand times before. That’s what the last 1/3 of Passengers is, the most generic and bland conclusion some random Hollywood suit could muster and still maintain all of his demographic quotas. Not only is it predictable, Jon Spaihts’ script undoes every ounce of the audience commitment previously built by cheapening our characters and crafting the easiest out possible for each predicament they’re currently in. It’s the equivalent of seeing a character on a plane careening towards the earth, and the only thing that would save them was a magical purple unicorn when BAM, one suddenly appears. Deus ex machina for dolts. I walked out not only irritated, I was genuinely insulted.

Passengers is a film that begins its journey crafting an emotional and intelligent story about two people with fatal flaws, tosses in one of the darker twists seen in a studio film in forever…and then deep fries it and calls it a meal. Based on the stunning art design coupled with the talent of Pratt and Lawrence, I would not dare call this a bad film. But it sure does kill an appetite.