Passengers

While star power has certainly diminished in Hollywood, it's always good to cast Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt in your movie. Both actors have devoted followings and modern franchises to their name and their public personas are generally endearing. Still I couldn't get super excited about their latest project Passengers. Neither could critics and as I watched this film I began to understand why as well. Here's what went wrong.

Pratt and Lawrence star as Jim and Aurora, two passengers on a spaceship destined for a colony on a distant planet. However, due to a malfunction via impact with an asteroid, the duo has been woken up early. Now stuck in spaceship destined to reach its destination in eighty years, the pair tries to make the best of their circumstances before the damage to the ship threatens to kill them and the still sleeping shipmates.

So I'm going to have to spoil a big aspect of this movie to review it properly. It's not a huge spoiler since about twenty thousand thinkpieces have been written about how messed up this movie's central twist is, but is a critical plot point the trailers didn't give away. If you want to know whether or not this movie is good, it isn't and as good as they are onscreen, these two can't save it. *Spoiler warning in effect*

The concept behind Passengers isn't a terrible one. Take two people, maroon them in a potentially soul sucking situation and help them find meaning via a personal connection and saving the lives of people they'll never meet. Here's the problem. Only Chris Pratt's character wakes up because of the accident. See the first third of the movie features Pratt going through an approximately year long existential crisis as he tries to entertain himself alone on the ship. He has no hope of going back under and as far as he can tell he's the only one that woke up. He gets so lonely that he starts obsessing over Jennifer Lawrence's Aurora and after about half a year of vascilating back and forth about whether or not to wake her up (and effectively end her life as well), he decides to go through with it. *Deep breath*

Wow There's a lot of dumb in that. So first and foremost, this is the strangest, grossest, stalkerish thing you could put in a mainstream science fiction movie and considering that things move towards romance that only makes it worse. It's a bad regressive idea that only reinforces a lot of negative stereotypes and treats Lawrence's character like an object that Pratt's character needs to survive.

There's about twelve different ways you could write this to make it better or more honest. Here's a couple quickfire ideas.

1. Portray Chris Pratt as a straight up villain whose isolation drives him crazy
2. Make it all about the need for human connection and have Pratt admit everything upfront.
3. Wake them both up at the same time and kill about thirty minutes off of this nearly two hour movie (save the effects budget too).
4. Make it about finding purpose in a potentially purposeless life, outside of love.
5. Make the corporation who made the ship to blame and this entire thing is some kind of sick experiment.
6. Make the ship damage so great that it requires two people and Pratt has to decide which person is best suited to help him, while also dooming them. (Needs of many vs needs of the few).
7. Have this ship saved by Rocket, Groot, Gamora, and Drax because Pratt's character is actually a brainwashed Star-Lord and Lawrence is actually a psychically powered villain that trapped him.

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Whatever else I have to say about the film including it's neat production design, decent effects, and the solid chemistry between the actors means nothing because this is all I could think about during the movie. I know this won't be the case for everyone, but this is the definition of deal-breaker in my book.

While the people and effects are pretty to look at, Passengers plot is too awful for forgiving fans. Skip this one.