Review of Passengers (2016) by Bigdegs29 — 22 Jan 2017

Did professional reviewers have a vendetta against this movie? I don't get the rating....

Passengers is far from perfect. In fact, it's ripe with plot holes. But I think its major problem for most people is that it tried to blend a male-centric genre (sci-fi) with a female-centric genre (romance) and may not have lived up to either. Frankly, I think it did moderately well. The sci-fi buff in me was intrigued, despite some impossibilities that occur in the movie, and I could hear quite a few ladies in the crowd, including in my group, who were weeping openly at several points.

SPOILERS AFTER THIS POINT:

There are two major plot points that seem to be tripping people up. The first is that Jim woke Aurora up, basically "murdering" her. The opinion seems to be that the movie gives him a pass for this...? I don't see it that way. Despite him spending over a year in complete isolation, the movie lambastes his decision for how deplorable it was. Yes, in the end, Aurora forgives him, but it's not like he was given a free pass! Several professional reviewers have spouted this "free pass" as being sexist, which just blows my mind. It has nothing to do with sexism, and all to do with a guy being alone for over a year and becoming suicidal and desperate. It's REALITY. I think they handled it perfectly. I think any reasonable person would understand they too may have made the same decision, or perhaps blasted themselves out the airlock. The second point DOES NOT get a free pass from me, but it's the sci-fi aficionado in me that prevents it. At one point the artificial gravity "turns off", which leads to a cool cinematic scene, but is still implausible. The artificial gravity is a result of centripetal force in space, so even if the mechanism maintaining 1G, or whatever the gravity was, shut off, that 1G would bleed away over a significant time, not turn off immediately. There's nothing significant that would impede the rotation of the facility to that degree. Regardless, it's entirely unfair to rate the movie based on one plot hole.

While I'm not sure the chemistry between Pratt and Lawrence was great, it was certainly passable. I also found the movie quite comedic. Rarely does a movie cause me to laugh out loud, but there were quite a few moments here that I did.

I think Passengers is a GOOD movie, that could have benefited from better writing and direction.

That said, anyone who loves sci-fi should go see this. Any romance lovers who can stand sci-fi should also go see it. I think they tried to make this the next big romance movie, and while the foundation is there for that, they don't quite really achieve their aim. Still, go see it.