Movie Review: Passengers

I hope you had a happy holidays over the past few weeks. What a wonderful time of year for everyone. But what would you do if it was just you and one other person alone in space? How would you celebrate? This weeks movie touches on that subject and more. I have been waiting to see this movie since I saw the first trailer. I would have done this review last week, but I decided against working during the holidays. Here are my thoughts on if it is actually as good as it appeared to be.

The movie starts with a shot of space then the space ship flies through. We have an empty and nearly soundless tour around the ship, when we reach the main control center. A system error shows up on screen, and it fixes it right away. An asteroid field shows up on screen and the ship is shown diverting power to the shield. Its scanner shows a very big asteroid in the field, but the shield breaks it into small pieces flying away in all directions. One of them hits the ship, which then fixes all but one error; a hibernation pod.

This wakes up Jim Preston (played by Chris Pratt), one of the 5000 passengers aboard. He goes through some things to help wake him up, then sends him to his room for rest. After resting, he wanders around, noticing nobody else is awake. After finding no other person in any area, he finally finds someone behind the bar on the first floor. The bartender Arthur (played by Michael Sheen) notices Jim and offers a drink of whisky. Jim sits down and, now realising Arthur is an android, says that his pod malfunctioned and he's the only one awake.

The storyline was slow moving at first. Now I understand needing to show the length of time of loneliness but I am thinking it got to be a little too much before we had something mildly interesting happen. Almost like a drawn out adult version of the first alone part of Home Alone. When we introduced Jennifer Lawrence as Aurora Lane into the mix it gets a little more interesting but still takes a while before getting into the meat of the movie. When it does pick up though it is good and keeps you on your toes.

The acting was way more real than I was expecting. The way Chris Pratt displayed the loneliness in the ship was almost exactly how someone would react. And when Jennifer Lawrence came onto screen, she made it feel like we were really watching her struggle and more. So what I am saying is the acting is not the reason the movie felt so long and drawn out in the beginning. Without the great acting I think the movie would have been really hard to watch, instead they kept our interest when the story lagged in everything else. I do not think they were as good as Matt Damon in The Martian, but I still really enjoyed what they brought to this movie.

Overall, it started out pretty slow, but with the acting being so good, it almost doesn't matter. And with the amazing graphics all around, you would almost believe this were a real space trip. So for all the reasons stated above I would rate this movie 7.9/10.