Review: Passengers

Loneliness is a poison that can lead to self-destruction or deplorable duplicities. Could you spend the rest of your life alone, fully aware that there is nothing but an endless stretch of days ahead? Would you be so desperate for human companionship that you would knowingly endanger someone's life to ease that solitude? This dilemma, its implications and consequences are at the heart of Passengers, a love story as sci-fi horror film.

The film begins as a malfunction overtakes the luxe interstellar spacecraft Avalon, which is three decades into its 120-year journey to a new colony planet named Homestead II. The malfunction prematurely awakens blue-collar mechanical engineer Jim Preston (Chris Pratt), one of the 5,000 passengers and 258 crew members aboard the Avalon who are meant to remain in a cryogenic sleep state until several months before they reach their final destination. Jim is aghast to discover that he has 90 years to go and, though takes advantage of the ship's many amenities on advice of the android bartender Arthur (Michael Sheen), the desolation begins to erode him.

With no hope of returning to hibernation and knowing he will die before the Avalon reaches Homestead II, Jim contemplates ending his life...until he sees Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence), a fellow passenger in deep sleep with whom he becomes fixated. Looking through her video logs and reading her writings (she's a journalist undertaking the journey so she can write the first book about the planet), he falls more and more in love with her. The heady combination of love and loneliness compels Jim to rouse the sleeping beauty from her slumber, an act that he knows is unforgivable before, during and after he commits it.

Many will be put off by the central premise of Jon Spaihts' screenplay, but it is this ethical conundrum that makes Passengers one of the most intriguing relationship dramas. Indeed, for about two-thirds of the film, Passengers explores the route very rarely taken. Jim has essentially consigned Aurora to her death - Spaihts does not hesitate to call it "murder" late in the narrative - and deprived Aurora of her choice not only to live, but to love. The film raises questions about the nature of love itself - is love borne out of proximity, of lack of choice, of a surplus of loneliness. Is it chemical, conditioning, or a compound of the two?

Or it could boil down to the fact that Pratt is at his most dashingly irresistible as the lovelorn Jim. Onscreen and offscreen, Pratt has mostly displayed a comic swagger, ready with a quip or cock of an eyebrow, and so there is a brief period of adjustment at the outset as one wonders if his line readings are comic or dramatic. Yet once Jim's despair sets in and the main narrative unfolds, Pratt grounds Jim with a melancholy and intent that renders Jim's actions understandable, if still unforgivable. Lawrence conveys Aurora's ensuing fury and indignation with shattering palpability.

Which makes it infuriating when Passengers essentially becomes Titanic in space in its third act. There are films that can survive disastrous final stretches, but Passengers is not one of them. Its thorny narrative is not meant for easy resolutions and, by taking this direction, it dumbs down the provocative morass it has engagingly crafted.

Director Morten Tyldum frames the action in Kubrickian compositions replete with unsettlingly cavernous spaces. This is a film that may have used a bit more claustrophobia, which is partially why a sequence that finds Aurora trapped in the swimming pool as the ship suffers a lapse in gravity is so stunning. Another, wherein Jim pleads with Aurora over the loudspeakers, is all the more chilling for the image of Aurora on the surveillance monitor, literally trapped with no hope of escape.

Passengers

Directed by: Morten Tyldum

Written by: Jon Spaihts

Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Chris Pratt, Michael Sheen, Laurence Fishburne, Andy Garcia