Movie Reviews

Has it ever happened to you that you wake up a couple of minutes before your alarm goes off? Sucks, right? Well, imagine that happening 90 years before you are supposed to get up. That shit won’t just ruin your day, it will mess up your entire life.

It happens to Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) when the spaceship he is on, hits a meteor shower. The ship is called the Avalon and Jim is one of the 5,000 souls on board hibernating in a pod until he gets rudely awakened. At first he is having the time of his life, enjoying all the amenities of the luxurious ship which is stocked to the brim for the period during which its passengers are awake and get acclimated to their new home, the colony planet called Homestead II. He even finds a friend in the form of bartender Arthur (Michael Sheen), but that only gets him so far seeing as Arthur is an android.

And then, after a year, things start to get old. Having the same breakfast for year will do that to a guy. Jim gets depressed and drinks too much. But then he develops a crush on one of the other passengers, Aurora Lane (Jennifer Lawrence) and makes a bad call. A very bad call. He wakes her up.

I’m sorry… did I make that sound all ominous? Like the part where this sci-fi flick turns into a frightfest? It doesn’t. Passengers is basically Cast Away in space with Pratt as Tom Hanks and Jennifer Lawrence as Wilson. Except that here Wilson and Hanks’ character fall in love until Wilson finds out it wasn’t an accident that he woke up.

It’s not the most engaging movie you’ll see this year and the script is pretty cliché-riddled (especially the ending), but it trickles along gently and director Morten Tyldum (The Imitation Game) makes things look pretty. And I don’t know, I found it kind of refreshing to see a science-fiction movie that for once did not include the token pissed off alien who goes around killing everyone.