Film Review - Passengers (12)

We were woken too soon - ninety years too soon.

I'm going to have to tiptoe like a prima ballerina around the plot of this, my final review film of 2016, to avoid spoilers. Passengers has been on the receiving end of some lukewarm write-ups, but I thought it provided solid holiday entertainment, enough to make me studiously avoid giving the game away. I mean the trailer didn't (for once), so why should I?

Passengers assumes a future where we haven't destroyed ourselves as a species (now there's a stretch for the imagination) and are instead starting to colonise space. The Avalon is a spacecraft transporting five thousand colonists to a planet so distant the journey will take 120 years, everyone stowed safely in hypersleep pods. 

That's until two passengers (Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence as Jim and Aurora) find themselves woken up 30 years into the journey, with no way of returning to their suspended state and the prospect of spending the rest of their lives on a great cavernous space vessel. Their only other company is an android barman called Arthur, played with vaguely unsettling charm by Michael Sheen. There's also the question of why each was woken up (neither has a clue) and what implications the truth might have for them and the ship as a whole. 

Let me focus largely on the film's positives - hey, I'm a glass-half-full kind of reviewer! 

For someone who enjoys his deep-space science fiction, the film looks absolutely gorgeous; watching its great corkscrew of a spaceship spiralling through the cosmos is a joy. The ship's interiors are stunning too, all of the vast vessel's technology and architecture created with love. And Sheen's lounge-bar has a borderline-creepy ambiance. All of this contributes to the film's central horror conceit - of being trapped in this beautiful but sterile environment for a lifetime. It's claustrophobia and agoraphobia combined, and stretches of the film capture the feeling perfectly. (I'm stuck at Aldergrove Airport as I write this, so I'm feeling some of that pain.)

That's not to say Passengers is all existential angst (had this been a European film it might have been, but that's a whole other movie). The film is sharply edited, moving pacily through each plot development and capturing the characters' wide-ranging responses to their situation with empathy and humour. Pratt and Lawrence both bring depth of feeling, with Sheen a fun but slightly eerie counterpoint. When the thriller elements of the film kick in fully, you're invested enough to really feel the jeopardy. 

Now the negatives. Some elements of the plot don't bear too much post-cinema analysis. Others are a tad too convenient. And as for the ending... It's one of those instances where the possibilities are diverging like the roads in the Robert Frost poem. Does the film take the right one? Wellllllll.... 

To sum up - I went into this film with lowish expectations and was pleasantly surprised. It's glossy and compelling science fiction with a spooky premise and some psychological edge. It's also pretty daft if you think about it too much, so my advice is DON'T. 

There. I shimmied through all of that without even hinting at the major plot twist. And that's how I intend to keep it all through 2017.

Happy New Year from Ed's Filmic Forays. See you on the other side!