Passengers - Official Movie Review

Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt star in an exciting action-thriller about two passengers who are on a 120-year journey to another planet when their hibernation pods wake them 90 years too early. Jim and Aurora are forced to unravel the mystery behind the malfunction as the ship teeters on the brink of collapse, with the lives of thousands of passengers in jeopardy.

[BrotherAlpha]

Easy way to fix this movie. Have Jennifer Lawrence's character be a scientists who would have some knowledge of what went wrong and might be able to fix it. Chris Pratt revives her and while they try to figure out what happened, they fall in love.

[BenjaminGr]

They're like, the movie is written to reward him for his evil behavior.
And she goes, yeah but he cute.

[seal]

Honestly Chris Pratt as the bad guy would have been more interesting. Like if he was an obsessive creepy dude and Lawrence is stuck in space with him wants to run away from him but can't. I could see that working.

[moeezS]

"It's 10 Cloverfield Lane if John Goodman was the romantic lead."

Goddamn XD

[BlazerManiacNumber]

This movie isn't nearly as bad as people are saying. It is entertaining.

[seal]

It's like Chris Pratt has been typecast as the boring male lead. I don't even think he's typecast to it I think he chooses scripts to keep with his image.

[enemay]

I love these moral giants, cause they absolutely know how it feels like to be alone in space, surrounded by sleeping people you can wake up any time to alleviate the pain. Yeah so black and white, the movie just totally says it's okay cause he's Chris Pratt, uhuh.

[DamitaJo]

"fat chris pratt is the hottest chris pratt." Smartest thing Alonso's ever said

[VisserGoedHart]

step 1: Be attractive
Step 2: Don't be unattractive

[FabFernan]

Spoilers or no spoilers make a decision. You can't say spoilers in the beginning and then say I don't want to spoile the movie while reviewing it, that's BS.

[felinefatale]

With that plot, it would've been much darker and creepier if they would've cast someone like Michael Shannon or Ben Foster in the Chris Pratt role instead.

[Faladrin]

This movie is so maligned. Ok, forget Bibb's summary, here is the real one:

Chris Pratt wakes up, alone, in space. Spends a year trying his damnedest to wake the crew, fix his sleep pod, find some other solution. At some point he gives up and tries to enjoy the luxury of the ship. Eventually that runs out and after coming a hairs-breadth away from committing suicide he trips, and in his view is Jennifer Lawrence (asleep). Seeing her in his darkest hour, on the brink of insanity or suicide, he has something to cling too. He then uses the ships computer to find out everything he can about this woman who has unconsciously re-tethered him to reality. Eventually though this can't last. An image of a girl sleeping can't replace true human contact. So he is left with a choice. Resign himself back to isolation which he knows will lead to insanity or suicide or make the choice to wake this person up, condemning her to the very fate which he so desperately is seeking to avoid (except of course she won't be completely alone, she will be there with him, which isn't quite as bad as what he is facing).

Ok, so he does a bad thing. The movie compares this to murder, but that's not actually accurate. It's closer to kidnapping. She's not killed after all, but denied the choice of how to live her life. You might think this is better or worse than murder, but it is different and both the movie and all the reviews I've seen miss this.

Now, the movie recovers from this choice in two ways. First, she beats the shit out of him. Not as bad as she could have, but she does. He actively stops protecting himself when she has some sort of metal club, accepting whatever she wants to dole out, but she realizes as much as she hates him for what he did that he's not actually evil (I choose to interpret things this way, you could also say she just doesn't have murder in her, but I think she looks in his eyes and sees not only is he sorry but that the choice he faced was a terrible one). Later they face a crisis and must save the ship and it looks like he is going to die to fix the ship and she obviously is faced with the idea of her own fate being alone on the ship and this must make her come closer to understanding what drove him to wake her.

Finally, he finds a way to put her back into sleep and he tells her and she chooses not to do it. So....all in all her character makes the choice in the end to stay with him. These characters are very well acted and written and within the scope of the movie you get fantastic eye candy (space, science, space, Jennifer Lawrence and I guess the ladies might like Chris Pratt), you get an interesting moral dilemma which is treated well by the script and actors (which is what makes this movie different from other movies that have crisis in space), you get a love story (yes it is a love story, one with some... bumps.. on the way).

I don't know you, and you don't know me. I can't tell you if you will like this movie. I can tell you people who are getting upset by it are trying way to hard to not let themselves enjoy this movie and probably are really sad all the time. Give them a hug and then if this movie sounds interesting to you, go buy a ticket. It's probably better than you think.

[Frredster]

Here's the thing about Jim's decision: he'd have HAD to wake someone up in the end in order to relieve the reactor (someone had to pull the lever, and someone had to hold the door open. Jim, by himself, could not be in both places at once). He'd have had to do it even without the loneliness factor.

[alphacause]

Christy's forgiving stance on Chris Pratt's actions is proof positive of the truism that, if you are good looking (i.e. Chris Pratt), you can get away with pretty much anything. If the same actions were performed by a balding short fat dude, she would say it was morally reprehensible. However, if a stud like Chris Pratt does it...oh well, that was so cute.

[supernaturalawesome]

How to fix: The Avalon is basically a coach class ship filled with low income passengers looking for a fresh start, imagine what the first class ships are like. When Pratt wakes up he pours over the manifest and the ship has nothing but blue collar workers like himself, Jennifer Lawrence being one of a handful of people who aren't. Thus no one who can really help him. The crew of the Avalon are all Synthetics who are all played by Michael Sheen. They fly the ship, perform maintenance, etc. for the entire flight. When Pratts pod malfunctions the robot crew can't put him under again. There programmed for service and ship maintenance not suspended animation. The ship has thousands of med pods but med pods and suspension pods are NOT the same. When Pratt desperately tries to hack the system, using manuals and instructions he looks up, he short circuits Lawrence's pod by mistake and can't bring himself to tell her. She finds out. Then they need to come together and save the ship. Pratt dies saving it and Lawrence, after years alone with only robots, contemplates purposely waking someone up.
FIN

[haruspex-]

The spaceship crew literally have the best jobs. They are basically time shifters. Each voyage they do puts them in a different century.

[icarus]

It sounds to me like it is a classic lifeboat situation where people in desperation are driven to do questionable things. But it is interesting the the female critic seems to get this but the two male critics do not. And in particular what they do not get is that Aurora is in the same lifeboat scenario. Are they being sexist while complaining about sexism? Because they do not seem to recognize that Jlaw's character has any moral agency at all. If she is going to survive she will have to put aside her anger and live with it. If she kills him she kills herself. Maybe the script should have been better, but I wonder if the audience will empathize more than the critics seem capable of doing. Critics today also seem to want movies to moralize heavyhandedly. I wonder if critics today can handle moral ambiguity. What would they think of something like Paths of Glory for example?

[TheNormalAsian]

I myself liked the movie and its direction, the unanswered is something life is, except and live with what you have and don't control what you can't. Said in the movie. I give it a 7/10.

[Croc]

That 'spoiler' was in the original blurb for this movie when it was in production so I don't know why they buried it in the trailer.

[RominaJones]

Sounds like some kind of Adam in Eve in space with all the metaphors along the way. When you said monster, I thought literal, alien/predator type monster and all of the sudden got interested in the film. That's the movie I want to see - The Thing meets Alien meets The Notebook, you know a Ridley Scott/John Carpenter mash-up doing Nicholas Sparks.