Monday 31 July 2017

Passengers (Morten Tyldum, 2016)

A passenger on a spaceship bound for a new planet wakes up 90 years too early from hibernation, and spends a year alone trying to divert himself, until being irresistibly drawn to one of the other sleeping passengers, who he then wakes up to have a companion. They fall in love, until the day she finds out what he did.
There is a highly questionable underlying assumption here, which is that we would find what he did, i.e. curtailing her life, acceptable just because he's Chris Pratt and she's Jennifer Lawrence, and their telegenic compatibility means that their relationship is not only excusable, but was just meant to be. If you can overlook that, and the numerous plunderings of the plots and/or style of other material, Moon, WALL-E and The Shining being just some that spring to mind, it does manage to charm at times. But the director, Tyldum, whose last works were the taut thriller Headhunters and The Imitation Game, is on a slippery slope by taking the Hollywood dollar with such compromised material, which then descends into a wholly unnecessary action sequence at the end, to complete The Titanic arc.

5/10

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