6/10

The advertising for this movie clearly hints that you're going to get a romance in space with lots of futuristic sets and special effects. So if you go into the cinema with low expectations like I did, just hoping for some diverting eye-candy mixed in with the space rom-com then you should be satisfied. I often feel robbed when I come out of big-budget movies, but in this case I was acceptably satisfied. However, there is the added bonus of a surprising horror-tinged plot angle which is not revealed in any of the movie advertising (see Act II).

The movie could be divided into a set of acts, like a play.

Act I - Alone

Handsome boy (Chris Pratt) slowly goes mad after waking up 90 years early on an interstellar voyage and realising that he is doomed to die alone of old age long before the huge ship reaches its destination. This act is reminiscent of Moon and The Martian.

Act II - Together

Handsome boy deliberately sabotages the hibernator of pretty girl (Jennifer Lawrence) and wakes her for company, thereby dooming her to the same fate as him. This unethical, selfish and criminal act casts a surprising dark mood over the movie. The feeling of unease is sharpened by lies and seduction.

Act III - Apart

Girl learns that boy lied to her and now she justifiably descends into her own madness of anger and futility as a result of his lies and betrayal.

Act IV - Disaster

It had to happen ... the gravity goes on the fritz, the automated systems go haywire, the hull has been punctured, the engines are overloading, a crew member (Laurence Fishburne) wakes up and soon dies, the food dispensers discharge and the FM radio is stuck on the jazz station ... the ship is doomed. Our plucky heroes have to work together to save the movie. They both almost die. They triumph of course and sail off into a barely satisfactory ending.

Although Passengers is full of improbable plot twists to keep it moving for two hours, it luckily doesn't deteriorate into 'stupid' or 'absurd' like most big budget SF movies, but sort of hovers around the edge of 'silly'. Given the low promise of the movie, some entertaining 'silly' is good enough and diverting enough. My generous 6/10 score is mainly a result of the fact that the movie didn't seem to have any grand self-importance and it's exactly what it says on the tin.

There are many nit-picking technical questions though:

• Why did he wake up the prettiest girl passenger instead of finding the most qualified technical boffin to help him?

• Why didn't this trillion dollar spaceship have more than one little auto-doc?

• Why couldn't they fit one hibernation preparation facility into the gigantic spaceship?

• Why does the spaceship have an ultra-luxurious shopping centre bigger than all of those in Dubai combined just to keep the passengers happy for a few weeks before they arrive at the Homestead II destination?

• Couldn't they have shared the auto-doc's life suspension feature and both arrived at about age 65? A delicate exercise in self-control, but possible.

Most these questions and many more are attempted to be answered by the script writers, but it's like they tried to juggle too many plot balls at once and then make excuses as they fly out of their hands.

As an SF fan, I kept thinking the plot could possibly head off down imaginative roads, but the writers and producers were too conservative as usual to attempt to challenge the brains of big cinema audiences. What if our hapless pair were intercepted by aliens? What if the ship was intercepted by a human ship of a technological level higher than when they departed (this happened in A E Van Vogt's book Quest for The Future)? What if their children arrived at the destination (I was really expecting this to happen)?

So in summary: a good looking and diverting movie with competent acting by the few lead actors, but all of the great SF potential of the plot was wasted.

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