Two passengers wake on a colony ship with decades still to run and only each other for company.

The sleep chamber on the Avalon opens 90 years early, and that is the whole problem. Passengers strands two people on a colony ship with nothing to do and nowhere to go, then asks us to care about a romance built on a lie. It runs 116 minutes. It should have run fewer.

Trailer, via Sony Pictures Entertainment.

The Pod That Wakes Jim Preston

Jim Preston is a mechanical engineer. An asteroid hits the Avalon 30 years into a 120-year trip to Homestead II, and his pod opens. He cannot go back to sleep. He cannot reach Earth, because the communication delay is too long. He tries to break into the crew hibernation room and fails. The ship’s AI cannot process a malfunction it has never seen, and the android bartender Arthur has no answers for him either.

So he waits. A year alone, with Arthur for company. Chris Pratt plays the isolation well enough. Then he sees Aurora Lane in her pod.

He knows waking her is wrong. He does it anyway, and tells her it was a malfunction. Jennifer Lawrence plays Aurora, a journalist and writer. She wanted a round trip and a book. Now she gets one life on a ship, and she spends the first stretch of it trying to climb back into a pod that will not take her.

Two Years, One Lie, One Bartender

The two fall in love over the next year. Jim plans to propose. Arthur, who has no filter and no malice, gives the truth away. Aurora is distraught. She berates him, shuns him, and physically attacks him. She rejects every apology he offers.

That is the film’s best stretch, and it belongs to Lawrence. The rage is earned. Jon Spaihts wrote the script in 2007, and it sat in development until Sony Pictures Entertainment acquired the rights in late 2014. You can feel the waiting in the middle act, where the ship’s entertainment zones stand in for a plot.

Morten Tyldum directed. Michael Sheen is Arthur. Laurence Fishburne appears as Gus Mancuso, the chief deck officer. Andy Garcia plays Captain Norris in a non-speaking role.

What the Avalon Gets Right

The ship is the best thing here. The Avalon carries 5,000 colonists and 258 crew, and it looks like a place people would actually live for a century. The production design earned an Academy Award nomination, alongside one for Best Original Score. Both are fair.

The problem is the arithmetic underneath the romance. Jim wakes Aurora because he is lonely. The film knows this is a crime against her and then spends its back half asking us to forgive him. It never earns that. A better version would sit in the discomfort instead of sliding past it.

Here is what Passengers gets wrong, in order of how much it costs the film:

1. The moral center. Jim’s choice is the story, and the film treats it as a speed bump.
2. The middle. A year of isolation and a year of romance both move faster than they should.
3. The ending. Aurora’s loss gets folded into a happy frame rather than faced.

A $303 Million Answer to a Smaller Question

Passengers grossed $303 million in box office against a budget reported at $110–150 million. That is a hit. It premiered at the Regency Village Theater in Los Angeles on December 14, 2016, and opened in the United States on December 21. Reviews were mixed. The performances drew praise.

All of that is true and none of it settles the thing. This is a film with a real idea — that love can be a sentence you hand someone without their consent — and it treats that idea as a premise to move past. The Avalon is gorgeous. Lawrence is furious and precise. Pratt is likable in a role that should not be likable.

What we are left with is a romance that asks for sympathy it did not build. The tagline reads, “There is a reason they woke up.” The film never gives a good one.

4.1 of 10.

Chris Pratt · Jennifer Lawrence · Morten Tyldum · movie review · Passengers · Sci-Fi Romance