This voyage goes off course and shipwrecks

Rating: 3/10 (1 July 2017)

NON-SPOILER SECTION
I want to give this film a higher rating, but the more I think about it the lower the score gets. Jennifer Lawrence as Aurora Lane is, not surprisingly, the bright spot, entertaining as always. The special effects are well done. The setup is intriguing: colonists on a 120 year flight to a new planet, two passengers (hence the title) wake up a tad too early (90 years too early!), and they discover something's wrong with the ship, and it's a race to fix it before everyone dies. How could Hollywood mess that up? Well, trust me, they do. In a science fiction film like this, there will be scientific inaccuracies and implausibilities, but that's forgivable. What's not forgivable are obvious and distracting plot inconsistencies and oversights and logical lapses that will occur to laymen like you and me during a first viewing, oversights and lapses that ultimately undermine my ability to suspend my disbelief. The characters offer some forced rationalizations to explain away some of the problems, but it feels more like someone realized late in production that there were major problems and attempted a band-aid or two. But more importantly, the film introduces a moral dilemma, a moral crime really, that could have a number of possible resolutions, yet takes the most insulting and unbelievable path to a 'happy ending' that I've seen in a long time. This could have been a profound journey that launched promisingly; but ultimately this movie founders.
SPOILERS
Two main issues.
The first main issue that undermined by suspension of disbelief was the lack of failsafe redundancy on this ship. The ship will be traveling for *120 years*, with no hope of any outside help, but the designers failed to have backup parts, plans, and procedures for the most critical components? After an asteroid collision, the computer starts to go haywire, but nothing about that awakens the crew? Seriously, the computer is not designed to awaken the crew if there is a fatal error that it cannot resolve? And really, no one ever foresaw a hibernation pod malfunction? There is no way to put someone back into hibernation if they wake up? Did all these people sign up for a potential suicide mission? If everyone is asleep and there is no chance of a hibernation malfunction, why exactly then is the crew locked away like Fort Knox? Why isn't there a backup reactor or two on the ship? And, of all things, the ship can't figure out there is a hull breach? A hull breach!? But perhaps the most grating of all: we find out there is only one Autodoc for a ship with over 5,000 people on board, with no backup parts or replacements! Seriously, these logical lapses occurred to me on a first viewing...I'd hate to see what else I missed during a second viewing. How did this film get past pre-production?
The second, and even worse, issue is Chris Pratt's character Jim. I think we can all follow along as he wakes up early, freaks out at his predicament, and tries everything he can think of to find a solution, and after a year gets depressed. Got it, check. But then!....in true Hollywood fashion, he 'falls in love' with Aurora and wakes her up. Of course we are hit in the gut with the moral depravity of this action, we clench our stomach as he leads her along, and we all hold our breath for when she finds out the truth. But then we start thinking about how implausible this all is. First of all, if he can figure out how to wake someone up, why doesn't he wake up a fellow mechanic? Or engineer? Or doctor? It's the most obvious thing to do, but of course in Hollywood-land, he doesn't do that. Second, hello! Once Laurence Fishburne wakes up, the bridge is now open! You know, the bridge, *where the crew is hibernating*. Even though Fishburne dies, Jim could now wake up one or more of the crew to get help. Hello!?
But let's talk about that "romance." I'm a lenient movie guy: I can play along with a lot of things. But *not* to the point that Aurora ends up truly loving this sick obsessive stalker who basically doomed her to a life of kidnapped isolation. Stop putting a happy face ending on this situation. The correct ending was for her to get back in the Autodoc and go back into hibernation. It was the only way for Jim to make up for his sin and salvage something from this shipwreck of a film.