Plot – A spacecraft traveling to a distant colony planet and transporting thousands of people has a malfunction in its sleep chambers. As a result, two passengers are awakened 90 years early.
Passengers was nominated for 2 Academy awards, Art Direction and Original Score.
I wanted to watch this when it came out in the cinema a few years back but never quite made it. The trailer led me to believe that the two passengers embarked on a journey and things started going wrong with the ship. Whilst this makes up a good chunk of the film the one major thing I never knew about this until now was that Jim Preston (played by Chris Pratt) woke up a year before Aurora Lane did (Jennifer Lawrence). The quirk being that it was Jim himself that woke Aurora up.. 10 points for guessing if he managed to keep that a secret or not.
The film is part space adventure part romance and quite nicely tips the balance between both. It is heavily hinted from the start that things are not quite right with the ship.
Michael Sheen plays Arthur the robot butler at the bar who informs Aurora it was Jim who woke her ushering in a segment of the film where she cant stand to be around him – and who can blame her for him effectively killing her… everything that was going so well for Jim starts crumbling down.
We get a nice cameo from Laurence Fishburne after this, “who the hell put a tree on my deck?”, who helps stitch the two parts of the film together nicely as up until this point it was very much a lost in space romance with our two main leads accepting their fate of being woken up 30 years into a 120 year journey with no hope of going back to sleep or waking the crew.. even an message back to earth is going to take 19 years to be delivered..
The remainder of the film is the race against time to save the ship as systems start crashing (giving us our Stand Out Moment below)
Stand out moment – when the gravity on the ship stops working while Aurora is swimming, cue a tense scene trying to escape the water.
Box Office – $100 Million US, $303 Million Worldwide.
Score – 6.5 out of 10. Decent enough film, run of the mill at parts. Pratt sways into comic goofball territory on occasion where playing it more serious works better for the plot.