So what kind of a movie is Passengers? It’s difficult to say. I’ll leave the details to the curious, with the caveat that nothing that happens is particularly compelling or unexpected. And a bit later than that, the ship’s ongoing malfunctions start to escalate, necessitating a series of life-or-death action sequences involving our heroes. Later, she finds out, and she is appropriately nonplussed. At first, Jim conceals what he did from Aurora, and the two begin to fall in love. Jim eventually does wake Aurora, of course, because paying Jennifer Lawrence $20 million to lie asleep in a tube all movie long would be money ill-spent even by Hollywood standards. “Jim,” he explains, “these are not robot questions.” Arthur, meanwhile, is no help at all with this massive, ethical dilemma. On the other hand, it’s been a whole year and he’s really really lonely. Also, I’ll note that while Pratt is good at many things, conveying a state of agonized deliberation is not among them.) On the one hand, Jim would be stealing Aurora’s future from her, dooming her to live, and die, alone on the ship with him. Smitten, he looks her up in the ship’s files and discovers that she is a writer (though all available evidence suggests a rather bad one) whose sense of adventure led her to travel to Homestead II in search of a great story.Įver more convinced that Aurora is his dream girl, Jim agonizes for months over whether or not he should wake her. One day, when Jim is at a particularly low ebb, he happens to gaze into the pod of one of his many fellow passengers and see a pretty blonde named Aurora Lane (Jennifer Lawrence). Passengers is at its most evocative when capturing a state of utter tedium.īut back to the story. (Those who prefer can skip to the next paragraph.) A whole ship fully up and running-the pool, the mall, the game arcades, the French and Mexican restaurants with their crudely accented robotic waiters, the self-serve space-walk facilities(!), and, of course, cheery old Arthur-despite the fact that no human being is supposed to be awake for another 90 years? And not a single one of these systems is capable of sensing that anything is wrong with Jim’s premature presence or of rousing the crew? It’s utterly ridiculous-though, I suppose, no more ridiculous than the fact that Jim spends a whole year drinking crummy coffee because he doesn’t have the “gold level ticket” required for macchiatos, but this in no way prevents him from relocating from his tiny, assigned cabin to a posh duplex penthouse. I’d like to offer a brief digression here to point out that none of this setup makes a lick of sense. And given that it’s gonna be a long long time, Jim figures he might as well be hi-i-igh as a kite. After all, as Elton John long ago noted, it’s lonely out in space. As days cycle into weeks, and weeks into months, Jim avails himself of the ship’s luxury amenities, moving into a nicer cabin, shooting hoops, playing a video dance game, and growing a Tom-Hanks-in- Castaway beard. (He is, essentially, a less ominous version of Lloyd from the Overlook Hotel.) Arthur offers Jim some generic bartender sentiment about taking each day as it comes-I should warn that this greeting-card-level bromide will make a return appearance later in the film-and Jim takes the advice to heart. Well, not completely alone: The ship’s lounge features a cheery robot bartender who is named Arthur and played with twinkly charm by Michael Sheen. He attempts to wake the ship’s crew but they are deep in their own slumber and locked behind an utterly impregnable bulkhead. So Jim tries all the obvious fixes: He talks to several of the ship’s computers but none can even fathom the possibility that he has been awakened early-this has evidently never happened before-let alone offer him any meaningful assistance. What’s going on, alas, is that the Avalon took damage crossing an asteroid field, which, among other minor glitches, caused Jim’s pod to short-circuit, waking him-and only him-90 years too early.
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