How come?
Hard lesson learned: You can't have it every which way in a Butter Popcorn Gobbler designed to fill up the largest auditorium at the Multi-Plex. You want to go dark and weird with your premise? Then you have to grow a pair and see your premise through to whatever dark end it takes you......
But not the crew who made this film......no way they're heading for the dark side when Sony has weaponized them with 110 million bucks, Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt......
In order to explain what we mean here, we're forced to discuss the premise, already laboriously detailed in 2000 other reviews.....but swiftly....
Big Ass Spaceship.....5000 hibernating colonists heading for a new planet, cause the Earth sucks...... trip takes 150 years, like the running time of a Transformers movie........oops, meteor shower......Chris Pratt accidentally un-hibernated, 90 years too soon......not good......Chris, lonely and horny as hell, deliberately un-hibernates Jennifer.....effectively dooming her to a life with Chris....and nobody else.....and nowhere else except Big Ass Spaceship....
You see the problem here. Chris Pratt, a poor lovable lug in the film's first act, makes the monumental, creepy decision to enslave Lawrence.....sort of like Adam picking out his own Eve, who didn't volunteer for the gig.
Take away all the galactic hardware, spacewalks and chatty Robot bartender (an annoying, poke-in-the-ribs homage to "The Shining")......and what you have is a just another stalker-and-his-captive-babe story, no different than "The Collector" or the most recent "Berlin Syndrome" (covered in an earlier post....)
Lawrence, once fully realizing her fate, uses all her considerable gifts as as actress to break your heart......she accuses Pratt, rightly so, of committing a form of murder. Pratt, the Millennial Burt Reynolds who stumbled into stardom, isn't anywhere close to Lawrence's league as an actor......he can only mumble polite contrition throughout the film's second half......
Unsettling stuff, no? But having painted themselves into this ominous corner, the filmmakers must have stopped and muttered....."hey, wait a minute. This isn't what the studio signed on for.......holy shit, we've got the two most lovable kids in cinema today! We gotta get these two back together....somehow....."
So Pratt needs an immediate maximum-strength Redemption......and we bring on the 30,000 CGI artists to orchestrate a plethora of calamities on the Big Ass Spaceship, to help Chris man up and prove his worth to Jennifer......so she'll come to realize, "hey, ya know, even if he took my whole life away from me.....he's not such a bad guy after all....."
It's noisy, exhausting and the whole thing reeks of last minute desperation.
Maybe another director working on a modest budget would have taken this story down the nasty rabbit hole it opened up once Pratt plucked Lawrence out of hibernation, but then that's another movie altogether......
We'll float out 2 begrudging
stars (**) for "Passengers".....and the only reason we're giving it any stars at all is for the luminous presence of Jennifer Lawrence......enduring the tribulation of every big movie star.....trapped in a misbegotten piece of studio sludge....
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