The spaceship Avalon in Passengers look pretty fucking cool. Like the slickest, upgraded version of a spacecraft in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Avalon zooms through the unending vastness of space like a spiraling drill gone haywire. Its mission: to transport 5000 passengers and 258 crew members from Earth to a very distant planet where they are to colonize and begin anew. When a male passenger, a mechanic by trade, wakes up 90 years too early due to a glitch in the hibernation chamber, we are privy to watching a man entertain himself on a gigantic spaceship all alone for eternity, until he decides he'd like some female company, and thus creates a moral dilemma. Passengers presents us with a story similar with the Biblical fable of Adam & Eve, and it rides that formula as far as it can go mostly on the charm of Jennifer Lawrence's Aurora and Chris Pratt's Jim Pearson, two Hollywood superstars of the present - and hopefully the future. The movie is never boring, I must say, and its production design and visuals are impressive and exhilarating, but its narrative, as well as a central conflict, is mostly lacking. The final act, when the characters have to make some "life or death" choices, plays out its conclusion much too safely and conservatively. It's unfortunate that the movie's screenplay didn't have the imagination of its art director.
B
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