FILMS… Passengers (2016)

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Deny the passenger who wants to get off with you…

 

A man travelling to a new planet wakes from his induced sleep too early. Fed up with an android barman for company, he wakes up a fellow passenger.

 

Pratt and Lawrence

Sheen

PASSENGERS – Official Trailer (HD), Sony Pictures Entertainment AND PHOTOS © Sony Pictures Releasing.

 

Hot blooded, heterosexual men, imagine this… you are Jim Preston (Chris Pratt), a mechanical engineer, you signed up for a trip on the Avalon spacecraft to live on a new planet, 120 years away.

You are pretty hot but single. At the moment, you are in blissful but induced sleep in your space pod. This is when the Avalon spaceship hits an asteroid, causing your pod to malfunction. This is before you arrive at your destination. You wake 90 years too early.

You find you are the only person on board of the 5000 passengers and 258 crew members, who is awake. After attending an information session alone, you eat breakfast by yourself in an empty dining room. You don’t see anyone in the soulless grey corridors. As the days go on, you get kinda hooked on the cereal. This is despite the fact that it looks like cardboard and looks and tastes much less tasty.

There are no staff members around to help you. They are still happily sleeping despite the ship being damaged – with their cabin locked so much your skills are useless –  and the ship is on autopilot.

The customer service is also less than helpful, and damn expensive but hey you’ll die before the bill comes and needs to be paid. For company, there’s the 3D staff and you have only a couple of game console dance partners to have fun with. Who isn’t as cool as that hot dancing one in Ex Machina (2015). This Ex-Machina girl also offers much, much more.

After a year, you feel you are destined to live and die on the spacecraft alone.  Forever. Forever alone. In time you become depressed and suicidal. That is until you take solace in the spacecraft’s bar. The bar reminds you a lot of the one Jack Nicholson went to in The Shining (1980). But there you find the company you miss in the form of an amiable android bartender in a natty red jacket.

Sadly, he’s just an android called Arthur (Michael Sheen) – and therefore kinda reminiscent of Tony Blair – with just something like a spring from the waist down leaving you as the only human awake. So while idly watching the other passengers’ video profiles on the ship’s computer – as you are more than a wee bit creepy – you spot a lovely looking girl, Aurora Lane (Jennifer Lawrence).

In her profile picture, she looks a lot like the actress, Jennifer Lawrence. You become besotted with Aurora. This is especially after checking her out as she sleeps in her (functioning) pod. You are happy to see, that she does look like Jennifer Lawrence.  You’ve spent over a year alone. You grew a beard and looked like Grizzly Adams. You aren’t getting any…

After confiding with Arthur you have many sleepless nights and soul-searching. With these almost one-sided conversations debating on whether to wake her up from her sleep. On reflection, it’s more like he’s paraphrasing everything you say.

He doesn’t usually do this, so obviously doesn’t want to get involved or get the blame if it all goes tits up. Eventually, you do wake her up – but wisely after having a shower, a shave and a change of clothes – just because you are lonely. Also, Arthur just isn’t that fun in the conversation department. Or that hot.

You then romance Aurora with the help of wee robots, a tree, a model you made of the Chrysler building and other romantic stuff. You say the most clichéd of romantic lines, especially in that restaurant where only you and Aurora are customers. Aurora’s birthday comes and you’ve made her an engagement ring…

The trouble is that Arthur has a good memory…  and he can talk.. and he does. It was your own fault really, you’d told him you had no secrets from her. That was stupid.

Girls, picture the scene. You’ve signed up for a space flight and you are an intrepid hot, photogenic journalist. With an amazingly cool name, Aurora Lane.  You are single with your BFFs, all hoping you’ll meet the one. You sign up for this flight to the Homestead II planet and its return flight. It will be the story scoop of the century.

However, unbeknownst to you, the spacecraft hit something in the asteroid field. This you are told later resulted in your pod in which you were sleeping malfunctioning. It seems you are the only one awake until you spot a handsome Chris Pratt lookalike. As you just can’t go back to sleep, so you decide to write a book.

It appears it’s just you and him. And a barman who looks like a former British Prime Minister, but he’s got no genitalia with only a spring from the waist down. After a while you find you are the only woman awake, you spend increasing time with the Chris Pratt lookalike, Jim who is also the only other human.

Jim asks you on a date in a contrived soppy way. Then you spend lots of time dancing, romancing… and after falling in love, your birthday comes. Jim remembers your birthday (yet you didn’t tell him it), could he be the one (as he guessed it correctly what’s the odds)… But then Arthur inadvertently drops that bombshell…

In this sci-fi romance film, there are in no particular order, soppy montages in space- which Darlin Husband says WALL-E (2008) did better – one or two surprising cameos (at some point in the film somewhere between the opening and closing credits) – and Chris Pratt’s bum.

There are lots of overly contrived moments – how convenient they chose those career paths – and there are lots of cool and nausea-inducing special effects. Admittedly I marvelled much more than the storyline and tension. Not just sexual or the Oh my God, Arthur just blabbed variety.  The feeling of claustrophobia is intense from the get-go. And it increases throughout the story. You feel it and must have been super intense in 3D at the cinema.

This is the premise of Passengers (2016), a film that should leave you with a major ethical question in your head. But instead leaves you with a feeling of WTF after the final scenes as the pair try to save the ship from its fate.  As you yearn for that well publicised alternate ending.

This showed Aurora in a similar quandary on whether to wake up another passenger. After Jim dies after stopping the ship from destruction, saving the passengers’ lives, and leaving her alone and the only one awake.

In my alternate ending, one could add to this scenario, at the point where Aurora checks out the remaining sleeping pod people. She spots a man she becomes besotted with… Failing that Arthur goes berserk and kills Aurora then finds out Jim is alive, and this leaves a Pratt with a new dilemma…

 

Weeper Rating: 0/10

Handsqueeze Rating: 🙂 🙂 🙂🙂🙂 🙂10

Hulk Rating: ‎  ‎   /10

 

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Outer Space on Film Blogathon 2018, No 17

Passengers (2016) was added to Moon in Gemini‘s Outer Space on Film Blogathon. Other films including this cast include,

• Mamma Mia 2: Here We Go Again with one cameo.
• The other cameo stars in John Wick Chapter 2.
• Chris Pratt stars in The Lego Movie and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol  2′s trailer review. 

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