MOVIE REVIEW – How dreadful can it be, really, if you’re Chris Pratt, or you’re Jennifer Lawrence, and you have to live the rest of your lives together alone on a giant space ship where your every need is satisfied? Aurora, Lawrence’s character in the Morten Tyldum-directed “Passengers,” is especially fortunate — she’s an average writer with a captive audience admiring her clichéd phrases.

 

Aboard an intergalactic shuttle, powered by the incredible star power of Michael Sheen, Jennifer Lawrence, Chris Pratt and Laurence Fishburne, all is not well with the workings of the machine. Jim (Chris Pratt) is a blue-collar guy, who awakes from suspended animation on the Starship Avalon, only to find he has another ninety years to kill and no-one to keep him company on this immense cruise liner.

An android butler and a sleeping beauty

An android butler (played by Michael Sheen as a cross between the barkeep in “The Shining” and C-3PO) is there to offer some solace – dishing out tired tidbits of self-help wisdom with a glassy deadness reminiscent of Chance the gardener in Being There – but it’s not quite enough to stave off the existential nightmare. Jim indulges in all the consumer luxuries he can find, until he’s had his fill and can’t go on, so he turns to the final answer of a fully commodified existence – online dating.

The sleeping Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence) wows Jim with her sassy video profile, and (smitten in the way of true voyeurism) he must wrestle with the dilemma of whether to bring her into the waking horror of his non-place existence.

Eve pissed at Adam, and their paradise is wonky as hell

After more than a year, our “Adam” can’t take anymore and wakes up “Eve”. Luckily, they both look like movie stars and soon they will fall in love. Unfortunately, there is an original sin in their Eden, and the two are separated, left to drown their sorrows separately at the starship bar tended by the impeccable and platitude-purring android Arthur.

The movie is trying to raise some interesting questions… What is one’s purpose in life? Do people have to live alone? Can some unforgivable feats be forgiven? Those are perhaps food questions, but the ship starts breaking down, and so does the movie itself.

Special effects are spectacular enough, but creativity is clearly lacking there, like with the spaceship itself, that resembles a giant Christmas tree ornament shaped like a corkscrew. Perhaps as a well-written play for a cast of three, “Passengers” might have been first class. Instead, it’s just another average sci-fi, with a strong romantic flavor added.

-BadSector-