Passengers

The Starship Avalon is 30 years into a 120 year voyage to the colony planet of Homestead II when it encounters a field of debris.  One piece is so large that it breaches the shield.  It is on account of this breach that Jim Preston (Chris Pratt), one of the 5000 Passengers on the ship, awakens from stasis.  He spends the next year trying get back into stasis, wake the crew, or call for help.  The $6000 call to Earth that will get a reply in decades was rather humorous.  His only company is an android bartender named Arthur (Michael Sheen).  Some of their banter is quite fun.  "This is not a robot question."  It was particularly funny when Arthur explained that stasis pods don't fail and was then unable to explain Jim's presence in the bar.

 

The movie has three acts.  There is the opening Robinson Crusoe where Jim attempts to make the best of his isolation.  This transforms to romance when Aurora Lane (Jennifer Lawrence) arrives on scene.  Though she experiences the same desires to get back into stasis as Jim did, he serves as the voice of experience and fatalism.  In the final act, it transitions to sci-fi thriller when Gus Mancuso (Lawrence Fishburne), a member of the crew, wakes up.  These are three different movies.  The sci-fi thriller was there from the start as background story but the movie needed to decide what it wanted to be.

 

As with most sci-fi movies, I am annoyed by the handling of technology.  With all the system errors, why wasn't there some way to wake the crew?  Heck, if we can have this wonderful conversationalist with access to an array of Homestead Company knowledge at hand serve as a bartender, why isn't there an android pilot on station, like David (Michael Fassbender) in Prometheus?  These systems have never failed so we will have no failsafes.  The design of the ship shows that gravity is maintained via centrifugal force but fails when the power goes out?  Did the ship stop spinning?  Gravity should have weakened but not 'failed' only to be re-established when the power came back.  But it is more exciting this way!  More interesting still, there are these little robots that clean up spills and even repair the blast shield in the reactor room.  So, they can do all this but couldn't perform repairs where the asteroid punctured the ship?  Then there is the ludicrous stuff.  The reactor is SO hot that it is cracking the blast shield designed to resist heat but a character in a recreational space suit is able to survive being in the path of the ejected heat?  Really?

 

Lawrence and Pratt have good chemistry and were fun to watch.  The movie entertains but it isn't something to rush to the theaters to see.  Go see Moana or Rogue One instead.