Passengers

You may have noticed that Hollywood doesn’t really make traditional “romantic comedies” any more.

Oh sure, there’s the occasional film that tangentially fits the bill. But say, Annie Hall? When Harry Met Sally? Hell, even the likes of You’ve Got Mail—these are the types of films that are no longer being made in 2016, at least by major studios. As a single word of explanation, they’re just too sincere for the Tinder generation, and that’s coming from a Millennial who met his girlfriend on Tinder. Multiplex audiences are both too cynical and too accustomed to genre crossovers to accept a simple romance, unless that movie is also a prestige drama or liberally dosed with a twist of action, science fiction, apocalypse fiction or superheroes. Straight “romance” is now the stuff of indie filmmaking. And that’s how we end up with the likes of Passengers.

We end up with Passengers when a room full of executives experiences a collective, earth-shattering orgasm at the realization that they get to produce a movie with a Chris Pratt/Jennifer Lawrence “sex scene” in it. Unfortunately for them, the film feels like they settled on the actors playing the leads before they’d ever taken a gander at the script…presumably because they were still in shock from the aforementioned moment of ecstasy, which must have been powerful indeed, and resulted in some serious clean-up.

Passengers plays like a film whose script was picked from a pile and deemed “acceptable,” as long as Pratt and Lawrence were there to star. “Nobody’s gonna care about the story,” you can practically hear an oily haired, clichéd producer caricature saying. “We got stars in this picture, young man. Mostly nude stars!”

This is an actual poster for the film. They legitimately thought that the two stars in it were the only thing necessary to put on the poster.

And yeah, you can’t fault legendary Old Hollywood producer Oily McShifty on that point. Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence may be the single most bankable male and female stars in Hollywood right now, and certainly among the most generally well-liked. It’s a testament to how badly flawed this script is that you could take the natural likability of this pair and find a way to make both of them repellent, or at least maddeningly artificial. In a movie tightly focused on two human characters, Michael Sheen’s android bartender often seems more real than either of them. It’s especially surprising that this is ostensibly the result of a Jon Spaihts script that has been in development for 10-plus years at this point—how could such basic character issues go unaddressed for so long? Or does this final product bear little resemblance to the original story?

Chris Pratt plays Jim Preston, an engineer who has paid his way aboard the transport ship/space ark Avalon as it cruises a lazy, 120-year voyage to the colony planet Homestead II. After the ship encounters a bit of trouble en route, he’s accidentally woken from hypersleep 90 years too soon, and left completely alone on the massive ship. Quickly realizing the predicament he’s in, and prevented from returning to suspended animation by Almighty Plot Necessity, he wanders the ship, drinks too much, eats junk food and never gains a pound, because this is what we call “soft sci-fi,” and it stars Chris Pratt. You don’t just stack on those Star Lord abs and then let them melt away for a movie the caliber of Passengers.

Jim is understandably depressed by his new lot in life, and what seems like a fruitless eternity of trying to get help. These segments are eminently watchable, and one can’t help but empathize with Pratt, whose puppy dog expressiveness and “aw shucks” demeanor have gotten him where he is in the industry today. It plays like one of those Twilight Zone episodes (there were a lot like this) where someone travels to a town/returns home, only to find that everyone has gone missing. Unfortunately, any sense of mystery or intrigue is jettisoned into the empty vacuum of space as soon as it’s time for Lawrence’s character to enter the story.

Here, I must acknowledge that one major spoiler is inbound. I apologize, as I typically believe that it shouldn’t be necessary to include specific plot points to review a film, but for Passengers this single plot point (which has been entirely, deceptively hidden in all the marketing materials/trailers) is key to the entire presence of Jennifer Lawrence in the movie, and one can hardly evaluate the film without getting the reader on the same page. So if you want to be totally unaware, skip the bolded section.