James Cameron knows how to make a movie look expensive. He does not know how to make a movie feel urgent. Passengers is a $150 million spaceship romance that spends its runtime doing everything possible to keep the audience away from the one thing it wants to be about. The result is a film that feels less like a love story in space and more like a cruise ship that happens to be orbiting a planet.
The setup is simple. A hundred thousand people are sleeping in cryogenic stasis aboard the Avalon, bound for a new colony on Homestead II. A malfunction wakes Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) early, and he spends 20 years drifting through the ship before he discovers that the system was supposed to keep him frozen until the next passenger woke up. That passenger is Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence), who has been asleep for five years. Jim decides to wake her, and the movie becomes a slow-motion argument over whether he was right to break the rules.
Trailer, via Sony Pictures Entertainment.
Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence Can’t Save This
Pratt plays Jim as a man who has lost everything except his sense of duty. Lawrence plays Aurora as a woman who has nothing left to lose. Together, they are meant to represent the collision of purpose and freedom, of the man who built the ship and the woman who wanted out of it. On paper, that sounds like a rich idea. In practice, it plays like two people talking past each other for two hours.
Pratt is the better actor here. He finds small moments of grief and resignation in Jim’s long isolation, and he sells the character’s gradual slide into despair. Lawrence is sharper and more exacting, but the script keeps giving her lines that undercut her. Aurora is supposed to be the wild card, the person who reminds Jim why he ever got on the ship in the first place. Instead, she comes off as a plot device, a walking embodiment of the movie’s own thesis about living and dying.
The chemistry between them is tepid at best. Pratt and Lawrence share a handful of scenes where they talk about the future, and none of it lands. Their relationship is built on a lie, and the film never finds a way to make that lie feel consequential. By the time the plot kicks into gear, the romance has become a footnote to the machinery around it.
The Ship Is Bigger Than Anyone Living On It
The Avalon is the star of the show. Cameron has built a world inside a wall, a hotel corridor stretched across dozens of floors, with restaurants, theaters, and gardens that rival anything on Earth. The production design is stunning, and the cinematography is gorgeous. The camera glides through the corridors, showing off the scale of the thing. It is the most beautiful cruise ship ever made, and it is also the most empty one.
But the emptiness is the problem. The Avalon is populated almost entirely by computer-generated extras, and the movie rarely takes the time to let us meet anyone else on board. There is a subplot involving a young couple who were woken early, but it is barely developed. There is a security officer who is clearly suspicious of Jim, but he is written off in a single scene. The ship is full of people, and yet the film never lets us believe in them.
This is a movie about isolation, and it fails to make the isolation feel real. The Avalon is a vast, lonely space, but the loneliness is abstract. We see the corridors, we see the rooms, we see the lights. We never feel what it is like to be the only person awake in a room that was built for a hundred thousand others.
A Malfunction That Refuses To Be Interesting
The central conflict of Passengers is a malfunction. Something goes wrong with the stasis system, and Jim wakes up early. That should be the engine of the story. It should drive the tension, the dread, the stakes. Instead, the movie treats it as a premise, a fact to be stated and then forgotten.
The film spends most of its running time on Jim’s internal monologue about what he has done. He talks to himself, he talks to Aurora, he talks to the walls. He tries to fix the ship, he tries to find a way back to sleep, he tries to find a way to die. None of it feels urgent. The malfunction is a threat, but it is a distant threat. It looms over the story like a storm cloud that never breaks.
There is a moment near the end where the ship begins to fail, and the movie finally gets what it has been waiting for. The tension snaps into place, and the audience feels it. It is too late. The film has spent so long building toward this moment that it has drained the energy out of it.
The Romance That Never Arrives
The marketing for Passengers promised a love story in space. That promise is a lie. The movie is about waking up alone, and it is about the fear of being the only person alive. It is about the weight of responsibility and the cost of making a choice. It is not about two people falling in love.
The romance exists to give Jim a reason to keep going, but it is never given enough time to become meaningful. Aurora is introduced late in the film, and she is gone from the story just as quickly. She is a catalyst, not a character. She triggers the action, and then she recedes into the background. The movie is about Jim’s journey, and Aurora is a passenger on it.
That is a structural failure. A love story needs two people. It needs them to grow together, to learn from each other, to change each other. Passengers gives Aurora a few lines of dialogue and a few scenes of reaction, and then it moves on. The love story is a ghost, a shadow cast by the larger machinery of the plot.
Comparing the Two Leads
| Lead | Role | Strength | Weakness |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chris Pratt | Jim Preston | Grief, isolation, resolve | Flat dialogue, forced humor |
| Jennifer Lawrence | Aurora | Sharp intelligence, emotional control | Underdeveloped, sidelined |
The table shows the imbalance clearly. Pratt carries the weight of the film, but the script does not give him enough to work with. Lawrence is sharper, but she is used as a prop. Neither of them gets a fair shake.
What Went Wrong And Why
Passengers is a failure of ambition. Cameron has built a world that could support a dozen stories, and he has chosen to tell one. The result is a story that is too thin for its setting. The Avalon is a marvel, and the characters are a burden.
The film’s biggest mistake is its refusal to commit to its own stakes. It sets up a malfunction, a ship in peril, a man and a woman who have been lied to. Then it spends most of its runtime letting those stakes drift. The tension is there, but it is unattended. It is like leaving a pot of water on the stove and then walking away.
The movie is also guilty of a kind of thematic dishonesty. It keeps telling us that life is precious, that every second counts, that the gift of existence is the greatest gift of all. Then it spends its runtime showing us a man who is trapped in a ship, a woman who is trapped in a marriage, a world that is trapped in a cycle of destruction. The message and the material are working at cross-purposes, and the audience can feel the friction.
“The gift of existence is the greatest gift of all.”
That line is spoken by Jim, and it captures the film’s central confusion. He believes that life is worth fighting for, and he fights for it. But the movie does not believe him. It shows him fighting, and then it shows him losing.
The Verdict
Passengers is a beautiful disaster. It is a film that looks like a masterpiece and sounds like a failure. It is a cruise ship that sank, and it is a love story that never arrived.
The final score is 4.1 out of 10.
