Just because you have a good concept for a film, it doesn’t mean that your finished movie is immediately guaranteed to work. Obviously you have to follow the idea to its logical conclusion, while ensuring that the various themes and morals remain steadfast, but if the story takes a wrong path, it can be disastrous for the finished product. If you need a handy example to help explain futher, you’d be hard pressed to find a better one than 2016’s sci-fi “romance”, Passengers.
Essentially stranding Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence in space on a luxury starship on its way to a distant colony, the movie starts off dropping some sizable, ethical conundrums on us that should raise some pertinent questions and pointed debate. However, while we start off with something of an edgy premise that stands in stark contrast to the slick, sci-fi visuals, we soon find Passengers could go in any direction it wants to – but ultimately picks the safest resolution imaginable.
In the future, we find the starship Avalon drifting through deep space while on a 120-year journey to transport its 5000 colonists and 258 crew to the planet Homestead II. It’s only thirty years into its voyage when a sizable meteor shower breaches the protective shields and cause a clutch of malfunctions, with the most sizable of them being the premature waking of mechanical engineer everyman, Jim Preston. Soon realising that he’s all alone on a gargantuan space ship ninety years too early and with no way to put himself back to sleep, Jim has to contend with crushing loneliness and existential dread while only having the basic food package to survive on (no gold passenger perks for him) and robo-bar tender, Arthur, for company.
After a year in solitude, Jim becomes more despondent the more hairier and unkempt he becomes, but after he seriously contemplates ending it all he stumbles across the hibernation pod of Aurora Lane, a writer whom he comes enamored of at first sight. After spending some time reading her works, he considers waking her for some much needed companionship, but struggles with the moral implications of essentially dooming her to his own, inevitable fate. Ultimately, Jim wakes her, opting to keep the truth from her and pretending that her hibernation pod simply malfunctioned just like his did. However, despite starting their relationship on the most horrendous of lies, the two soon bond and ultimately fall in love as they genuinely seem to be meant for one another.
However, the truth will eventually out – but while Aurora is understandably pissed at the fate that Jim has doomed her to, those earlier ship malfunctions that started whole mess in the first place soon need to be addressed, otherwise no one is making it to Homestead II. Can the pair push their differences down long enough to figure out how to save the Avalon?
To this day I still maintain that there’s a good, interesting and vital film lurking within Morten Tyldum’s glossy, sci-fi romance, but while it raises important questions with the choices made by its main character, there’s a point where the film backs off from anything approaching a complex continuation of some intriguing moral themes and suddenly becomes one of the most forgettable movies ever. One one hand, I can somewhat understand the cowardly decision to cop out on the edgier themes considering that giant starships, robot bartenders and the double act of Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt doesn’t exactly come cheap, so the filmmakers thought that they should save the box office by keeping any controversy to a minimum. But in doing so, all they’ve succeeded in doing is neutering the very reason the film probably got made in the first place.
The main point is the moment where a depressed, lonely and suicidal Jim opts to wake the woman he’s become obsessed with to join him in his fate of being alone on a spaceship that won’t arrive at its destination several decades after he’s died of old age. It’s a great moral pickle for an audience to wrestle with as conflicting views could have stimulated conversations for days after viewing thanks to raising pros and cons about male entitlement, the loneliness epidemic and whether or not Chris Pratt’s character is a big old creep for dooming Lawrence to the same fate just because she’s pretty and he likes her writing.
To be fair, the first half of the film actually sets this all up pretty well and while Pratt is somewhat miscast (some Ryan Gosling soulfullness might have been a better fit than Andy Dwyer from Parks & Rec), he’s doesn’t do a bad job portraying the crushing isolation he weathers for a whole year before making his terrible decision. With Lawrence now up and about, the film gets even better as the two do actually fall in love while Jim attempts to swallow his guilt, and when the honeymoon period inevitably ends as Michael Sheen’s cordial, drinks pouring spoiler-bot spills the beans, the movie openly explores the ramifications when Aurora is appropriately mortified.
However, it here where Passengers could have gone anywhere. We could have switched into thriller territory and have either Pratt or Lawrence go nuts and stalk the other; we could have taken a trip into black comedy territory as the two maybe start callously waking up other members of the ship just to have someone else to talk to – in fact, the one place where the story shouldn’t have gone is to suddenly turn into a disaster film that sees the pair suddenly have to re-team in order to save the ship from a third act calamity. The result is that despite working so hard to create a scenario that feels wondrously anti-romcom, the film suddenly not only takes the safe choice, but shooting for a happy ending means that everyone watching now suddenly has to be happy with Jim’s controversial decision no matter what. At best, we have a very awkward fairy tale ending and at worst we’ve ended up with an incel WALL•E that ditches any sort of meat to sink your teeth into.
It’s something of a minor tragedy as there’s so much about the film that’s promising beyond that central, major plot point. The world building is solid, landing somewhere between the aforementioned WALL•E and Sunshine, both the leads do all that’s required of them, the plot goes to some genuinely dark places and Sheen does a lot with a little, which helps with some distracting (and frankly unnecessary) cameos from Laurence Fishburn and a blink-and-you’ll miss him Andy Garcia.
What could have been the sci-fi equivalent of an intergalactic Gone Girl (Lust In Space, anyone?) Passengers devotes its startlingly bland third act to smooth out the politics of its sharper edges until the film is so blunt, it couldn’t even slice butter. While the final shots are admittedly sweet, we only get the faint echoes of a far more challenging film that’s gradually smothered over the course of its runtime. Don’t watch this space.
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Where to watch Passengers: