J-Law! Chris Pratt! Chris Pratt’s gratuitous ass! (I swear it did nothing for me).
BQB here with a review of Passengers.
So, 3.5 readers, do you know how technology rarely works?
I mean, it works great for a little while but sooner or later it breaks down, develops a bug, has something go wrong with it and after you exhaust yourself with tech support and trying everything you can think of to fix it, you eventually pull your hair out and give up, resigning yourself to the fact that you’ll have to just live with a shitty piece of equipment until you can afford to buy a new one which…will eventually break down?
As it turns out, technology isn’t that much different in the future. Unlike the sleek, always operational ships in Star Trek, the Homestead Corporation’s ship totally sucks.
Five-thousand passengers are suspended in hyper sleep for a hundred and twenty year trip to a new planet, Homestead II.
Unfortunately, technology sucks in the future just as it does now, as Jim Preston (Pratt) and Aurora Lane (Jennifer Lawrence) wake up way too early with ninety years left before they reach their new home world.
In other words, they’re stuck in a ship for life, with no way to fulfill their dreams, doomed to wander the craft’s metal halls, perpetually bored forever with all of their plans out the window.
I must admit, I didn’t expect much out of this film going into it so I was pleasantly surprised by its awesomeness. Even though there are only two characters (four if you count Michael Sheen as Arthur the bartending Android and Laurence Fishburne as someone but I can’t tell you who yet), there are plenty of epic twists and turns as well as some fabulous special effects.
As I sat there watching it, I thought to myself, “Yeah! My laptop, TV, and cell phone all worked for about five minutes after I took them out of the box so I could totally see my sleep pod malfunctioning and leaving me to live out my life on a ship!”
See? Technology sucks, even in the future.
Hyper sleep has long been a staple of sci-fi space travel films. Interstellar, for example, opened our eyes to the concept that theoretically, it would be possible for a space craft to make it out into deep space as long as there is a way to preserve the human travelers, otherwise they’d live out their lives and die in transit so what’s the point?
But this is the first film (that I know of) to utilize hyper sleep as a big plot device. While there are moments of comedy as Pratt and J-Law plead for help from pre-programmed, bureaucratic robots who assure them that it is impossible for them to be awake, the film is also a drama, a love story, and a suspense thriller all rolled into one.
Faulty technology, incompetent tech support help and a corporation that doesn’t plan for things going wrong? Yeah, this film may be set in the future, but it does feel like life in 2016. Somehow, it seems more plausible than Star Trek.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. Worth seeing on the big screen. Excellent date movie. Women, stop looking at Chris Pratt’s ass. Chris Pratt, stop showing everyone your ass. I bet no one even asked you to show it, you were all just like, “I’m gonna let my cheeks flap in the breeze!”
Bookshelf Battle 