Passengers (**1/2)

The premise for PASSENGERS is a smart one, so are the actors. What if you awoke on a 120-year mission on a voyage to a new planet only 30 years in? With no chance to go back to sleep, you are a castaway amongst a sea of people who you will never meet. This turned out to be a movie of 'what-ifs,' with an ending that was so silly and left me moaning out of annoyance. So much could have been explored had the writers used half their brain.

This is Morten Tyldum's first directorial work since "The Imitation Game" which was a fine movie about code-breakers in WWII. Here is a movie that is more simple. Jim (Chris Pratt) is the unfortunate man who awakes far ahead of his colleagues. At first, he doesn't know what is happening. He comes out of cryo-sleep and follows the normal protocol and settles into his room aboard the spaceship. Were he to have awoke at the proper time, they would have had 4 months of life on board to adjust before heading to their new planet (an earth-like home that provides an escape from those wishing to leave their homes behind). Jim quickly sees the problem, alone on a ship with no one to talk to (besides a chatty robotic bartender who was clearly written to serve as a lazy plot device. Notice how none of the other robotic aids on board look remotely human). He explores the empty space and spends a year in isolation before even making contact with anyone.

Here is where the trailer led us astray. I would argue that the trailer set up an entirely different movie, because the occurrences that lead Jim to meet Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence, what a coincidental name for an actual sleeping beauty) are morally gray and make our hero an altogether bad man. I don't want to spoil it, but the film is so silly that it seems like a waste if I don't. Jim falls in love with Aurora after walking by her in cryo-sleep. He reads about her, listens to her recordings. Faced with a future alone, he makes the choice to wake her up and essentially commit murder by denying her the chance to wake up with the others 100 years from now. No matter his actions, this is a corrupt action that (love story or not) turns Jim from lovable to villainous.

Of course they fall in love, and as luck would have it another crew member is woken up (Lawrence Fishburne) who helps them realize that there is a fatal error on board that could lead to the destruction of the ship. Like the bartender (played by Michael Sheen mind you), here is another character that was lazily included and dumbs down the plot by turning the story into a cliched action flick. Yes, Aurora discovers that Jim woke her up, but in the end they still manage to say their "I love you's" before heroically saving the 5,000 sleeping passengers on board and living out the rest of their lives in a Stockholm-syndrome lover extravaganza.

The movie could have been interesting if it stuck with one character learning to live by himself. It also could have been interesting to see what would happen if Jim and Aurora managed to fall back to sleep and meet again 100 years from now. Would they still fall in love? I liked the idea but didn't care for the actual story. Lawrence and Pratt are fine actors, but even their chemistry can't save this sinking ship. One trailer declared that this was "Titanic in the stars." That's quite a statement. Maybe they were referring to the actual wreck and not the plot.