Science fiction has the best premises. No surprise there; any genre based on impossible what-ifs is bound to wind up in some interesting places. What if interplanetary travel were possible, for instance? What if people could get on a starship, as they do on a plane, and emigrate to a new life on a new planet? The voyage would take a long time โ 120 years, say. The passengers would be in a state of suspended animation, roused from their slumber just a few months before they reached their destination. What if something went wrong, though? What if one passenger was woken up too early? Like for instance, 90 years too early?
Jim (Chris Pratt) is the passenger in question, finding himself awake, alone โ except for robotic bartender Arthur (Michael Sheen), programmed to polish glasses and offer bartender wisdom for all eternity โ and apparently doomed to live and die in transit between Earth and the planet Homestead II. The premise works on many levels, including as a metaphor for vanishing humanity in a mechanized world. โI need to talk to a person!โ pleads Jim as he keeps bumping up against chirpy robotic messages. (He does finally locate a helpline and send a message โ but his message will take 19 years to reach Earth, so it doesnโt really help.) And the premise also works on a more basic level, as a space-set Robinson Crusoe with increasingly shaggy Jim trying to get used to life alone.
His plight differs in two respects from Robinson Crusoeโs. First, his desert island is lavishly appointed: he may be lonely but he lives in luxury, taking advantage of facilities designed for 5,000 people. There are games and pastimes, little robots to pick up the crumbs if he spills anything, even a spacewalk where he can gaze at the stars and weep at the enormity of his solitude โ though admittedly all the good meals are reserved for Gold Class passengers, forcing our hero to breakfast on black coffee and lumpy porridge. (Could even vacuum-packed meals last for 120 years without going bad? I suppose they do things differently in the future.) Yet thereโs also a second difference from the usual castaway: Crusoe was truly alone, Man Friday excepted โ but Jim, who craves human contact, is surrounded by people, 5,000 of them in fact. The only problem is, theyโre all asleep.
Jim is an engineer; he could probably get a pod to open prematurely (like his own did) if he tried. But then heโd be taking that personโs life, forcing them to live out their years on the spaceship; itโd be murder, or at least a murky kind of exploitation (the film points out that the passengers are themselves being exploited, by the company behind the space travel programme). This is where Passengers gets quite intriguing, adding a moral dilemma to its physical situation. I wonโt say what happens next โ itโs obvious anyway, if you glance at the cast list โ but the filmโs poor reviews and box-office failure seem undeserved, at least for an hour or so. That premise hooks you.
There are two problems, both pretty major. The third act โ when Jim discovers that the ship is badly damaged, and tries to repair the damage for the sake of the sleeping passengers โ is shoddily done; the introduction of an extra character played by Laurence Fishburne, whose only function is to (somehow) appear, give Jim the information and equipment he needs then quickly expire, is an embarrassingly un-creative way of taking the plot where it needs to go. The other major problem is that the ending is awful โ or, if not awful, abrupt to the point of hilarity. I can only assume there was a whole other section that got cut at the last minute; either way, Andy Garciaโs โroleโ in this movie is among the most ignominious career lows ever suffered by a major actor.
Itโs a huge lapse, of course; a premise is no good unless itโs consummated. Passengers is likely to leave viewers feeling dissatisfied (word-of-mouth mustโve been lethal) โ yet most of the film is perfectly fine, the Twilight Zone premise easing into love story with Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence making the heavy lifting of a two-character drama seem effortless (Sheen, meanwhile, joins a long list of memorable barkeeps including Joe Turkel in The Shining, Brian Dennehy in 10 and Ethan Hawke in Predestination). At the core of this flawed, absorbing movie is a tale of machines breaking down to expose our fragile humanity, and the questions that asks of us: Is our life really in our hands? Should we try to get what we want, or make the best of what we have? Are we all just passengers in the hands of Fate? As Arthur says when our heroโs moral triage gets a bit too complicated: โJim, these are not robot questionsโ.
DIRECTED BY Morten Tyldum
STARRING Chris Pratt, Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Sheen
US 2016 116 mins
