Passengers
Directed by Morten Tyldum
Written by Jon Spaihts
CAST:
Jennifer Lawrence as Aurora
Chris Pratt as Jim
Michael Sheen as Arthur
Laurence Fishburne as Gus
I wasn’t going to review from DVDs, but I was loaned a blu-ray to try out my new 65 inch screen. We watched Passengers. The next day our older grandkids saw the blu-ray and asked to watch it, so I saw it twice in two days.
I’d seen Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt promoting it on a chat show. The chosen clip was them emoting before some controls in a dark control room. I was left with the impression of a cast of two in a dark, blue-lit spaceship cabin. Not true. Nothing in the clip set up the intense bright virtual world of the Starship Enterprise Avalon.
The Avalon bar. The Enterprise never had this on board.
What this film is, is Star Trek with no aliens or battles, meets Red Dwarf but with less humour.
Forget IMDBs list of people who appeared for microseconds on a tablet screen within the film. The cast is four. Period. Oh, just like Red Dwarf. They’re on their way to colonise Homestead II. The starship is a commercial operation, and an asteroid hit screws up the computer. DIVERT FULL POWER TO SHIELDS says the wording on screen. Good plan. Just what I would have done in the circumstances. Of course as a corporate enterprise (or Enterprise) there’s shoddy workmanship throughout.
So Jim (Chris Pratt) is woken from his hibernation pod 90 years early and has the run of the ship. The other 5000 passengers and several hundred crew are still in hibernation. Half the speed of light it’s going, it says, which is poor sci-fi. You need at least a warp drive for this sort of thing. Far too slow.
The only company is the Android barman, Kryten, I mean Arthur (Michael Sheen). Arthur’s name and English accent must surely be a reference to Arthur Dent of a Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. Then James, ‘call me Jim’ references the biggest Jim of all, Captain James T. Kirk of Star Trek.
After a year spent mainly growing a thick brown hipster beard, Jim is lonely and decides to wake the gorgeous Aurora from hibernation. Aurora? Princess Aurora is the name of the princess in Sleeping Beauty, the Disney animation. Right. We get it.
This makes Jim a bastard, because like him, she’ll be compelled to live out the 90 year journey in hyper-space. It also rings bells on the Faust story and his conjuring up of Helen of Troy from the dead as a companion.
Aurora, Jim & Arthur
So they fall in love. Arthur is their friendly barman and confidante in a Casablanca sort of way. Unfortunately Kryten Arthur Dent Arthur lets slip, as Androids do not having the gift of lying, that Jim woke Aurora before awakening Aurora in a different sense.
Aurora is really angry now …
She calls him a murderer who has stolen her life, so he builds a leafy tree in the concourse, as one does in that situation while she jogs around the decks looking angry. Gus appears in his blue Star Trek uniform with gilt epaulettes, an officer with a key to the command deck. Entropy has set in. Jim gets stuck in a lift. Aurora gets sprayed with Rice Krispies from the breakfast machine (she is a Gold Pass holder so entitled to the full smashed avocado on sourdough, unlike Jim with his plain black coffee. She also gets a suite). The African American Scottie or maybe Rimmer Gus was awoken by the spiralling faults in the system. Reminds me of our home broadband. He will die. His name has to be a reference to … I googled and there was a Gus in Clone Wars and another in the Canadian sci-fi comedy Tripping The Rift. I’d go for the latter as he’s an engineer and it parodies Star Trek.
Aurora & Jim prepare for a quickie … space walk, that is
Jennifer Lawrence has the ultimate girlie role. Way better than Lieutenant Uhuru. Not only does she get lovely wispy frocks, but she jogs, swims in a fetching 25th or whatever century swimsuit, gets near drowned when the gravity fails leaving her athletically posing in the middle of a huge floating globule of H2O.Then she does a heroic rescue of Jim while dressed in a spacesuit, shows her natural female nursing skills in pushing the right buttons on the machine to revive him, and repairs Kryten Arthur’s damaged face with skilled cosmetic application, then ends in a lovely red cocktail dress.
The Avalon swimming pool with picture windows to the stars
Of course much is ludicrous. I particularly admired Jim’s spacesuit’s ability to withstand a full-on fusion / fission explosion while saving the ship by opening the door to the reactor. It is a tad warm, but not too hot. Scottie would have been proud of him, even more so of his attempts to open the control room door with a sledgehammer. Scottie would have done it with a screwdriver. But then Scottie would have repaired the warp hyper drive with a screwdriver.
The internet has long discussions on the viability of half light speed and the distance of named stars. You really won’t notice. There are several niggling points … e.g. if everyone is in stasis (Red Dwarf‘s term) for 120 years, why are there lights on the ship? I’d say they’re like the ones installed on our stairway 20 years ago, activated when someone walks into the area. I furrowed my eyebrows a bit when the starship flew close in to a red dwarf (STAR not programme) to get acceleration. If you’re skating over the surface of a star you’d need amazing heat shields, but as we know, Jim can survive a nuclear blast with a handheld one and space suit.
OK, it’s very good. It looks great. I willingly suspended disbelief, even the second time. Well, nearly. The ending was a Saturday afternoon weepie cop out. Michael Sheen is brilliant as Kryten Arthur Dent Arthur . There is some humour, but a a subtle level and mostly it involves the banter in the bar.
Arthur continually polishes glasses. No one likes an idle barman.
I feel a sense of been there / done that, in that I wrote an ELT reader for English learners called Space Affair thirty years ago.
Space Affair (OUP 1988), Space Affair (OUP 1997), Space Romance (Garnet 2014)
That had hibernation pods (so I know the rules of deep space travel over many years for colonists) and a romance. The third edition name-switched to Space Romance to remove any suggestion of Inter-Galactic impropriety. My hibernation pods were two weeks on / two weeks off, and I also introduced an interesting element. The first colonists found that the third and second colonists who had a later and faster hyper / warp drive were already there when they arrived. No matter, no one made mine into a film, though I am open to offers.