Movie Reaction: Passengers

Formula: Z for Zachariah + Moon

There isn't a place for Passengers in the current Hollywood model. It's a $110 million character study. That's not a thing. Not these days, at least. A studio doesn't want to devote that much money to something that doesn't look like a blockbuster. It took getting two of the biggest stars in the world and an Oscar nominated director to get this made, and I'd still wager there was a lot of studio influence involved.

Passengers is about a spaceship making a 120 year journey to a new planet. It has 5000 people on board. That is, until one of the hibernation pods breaks and one of the people, Jim Preston (Chris Pratt), wakes up 90 years too soon with no way to go back to sleep. For a while, he recreates the pilot of The Last Man on Earth [in space!] until a fellow passenger, Aurora Lane (Jennifer Lawrence), wakes up too. They try to make the best of that hopeless situation as the two prettiest people in space. Meanwhile, the ship is slowly breaking down and they have to fix it or else everyone dies.

The movie is divided neatly into about four parts: Jim alone, Jim and Aurora together, Jim and Aurora apart, and an action movie. Part one is fine. It's needed to establish things. Pratt can handle doing a scene by himself or talking to his robot bartender (Michael Sheen). The middle parts with Aurora are where the movie thrives. There are some fantastic moral debates. Pratt and Lawrence play off each other nicely. I'd watch a RomCom with them any day. It's the final part that bothered me. It bails Chris Pratt's character (who has done so bad things) out entirely, which undercuts everything about the movie before that. Really, everything in the last 20 minutes is afraid to make a bold decision. I can't prove that the ending was influenced by a studio executive, but what happens at the end of the film is exactly what I imagine when I hear the term "studio interference". And the thing is, I'd happily watch the movie that it becomes in the end. It just doesn't fit with the first 3/4s of the movie.

This is a film that couldn't work without charismatic leads, since so much of the film is one, two, or at the very most three actors in a scene. Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence are smart casting decisions. Pratt especially breaths life into scenes that should be quite dull (reminiscent of Sam Rockwell in Moon). Lawrence has a more difficult role. She has to go through the same emotions that the audience already saw Pratt go through and then some. She handles it well though.

The film looks great. They could've easily scrimped on the sets, given the claustrophobic setting, but the spaceship feels sufficiently large (to a point) and believably futuristic. I question the business model of the Homestead Corp. (who owns the ship) and Aurora's motivation for making the trip. Those are things you just have to accept though. The movie isn't about that.

The individual pieces of Passengers are good. They don't all fit together well. It doesn't know if it wants to be a "serious movie" or a blockbuster. It's entertaining throughout. I wasn't bored by it. Many parts are quite clever. I love the questions it asks and don't like the answers it provides. It's an uneven movie that I could easily enjoy despite that.


Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend 

After the Credits

(Some thoughts for if you've seen the movie)

OK, let's talk about Jim for a moment and how the movie goes too far to let him off the hook. He did a bad thing by waking Aurora. For a while, it makes him sit with that, both before and after she finds out. The "drowning man" analogy that Lawrence Fishburne's character gives is a perfect counter to it. I was very curious to see how the film would resolve this.
It turns out, the solution was to go overboard to excuse it. Let's take a tour through the beats:

1) Without Jim and someone to help (cough - Aurora - cough), the ship would've failed and everyone would've died anyway.
2) By holding the exhaust door open, Jim gets a heroic, redemptive act, but one that someone doesn't kill him.
3) It requires Aurora to have to save him after his tether breaks. By the way, if I learned anything from The Martian, it's that what she does is nearly impossible. That scene may have spent all of my "One big leap" allowance.
4) She also has to bring Jim back from the dead in the infirmary. At that point, it would've been subtler if they just flashed "SHE REALLY DOES CARE FOR HIM" in big bold letters on the screen.
5) There's a way for her to go back into hibernation is she wants. That makes it Aurora's choice to stay with Jim, absolving him of all wrong doing.

I'm not saying the movie had to have a sad or bittersweet ending, but the majority of the movie certainly wasn't building toward a wholly happy ending.