Promising, but an Underwhelming and Uninspired Result

Rating: 5/10 (23 December 2016)

The premise of Passengers is fascinating, and it stars two of the hottest names in Hollywood, but the end result falls short of anything remotely close to what I hoped this would be when it was announced a few years ago.
Directed by Morten Tyldum, director of the acclaimed The Imitation Game, Passengers is about two people who mysteriously wake up 90 years early, aboard a ship headed to a new planet. Marketed as a sci-fi with a romantic angle, but it's really more of the opposite. There's a lot of good in Passengers, mostly dealing with the lead's chemistry, but the lack of focus and identity is where it fails the hardest. That, and the fact that the script feels like something thrown together at the last minute.
I feel like once Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence signed on, the filmmakers fast-tracked the production to take advantage of the two's widespread appeal. It's unfortunate, because there's a good film in here somewhere. The idea of living alone vs forcing someone else to live the rest of an isolated life with you is explored, but only sparingly. The sci-fi elements are surface level, and anything that needed an explanation was brushed off in some casual & paint-by-numbers way. I would have preferred one or the other. Either go cerebral like Interstellar or stay within the silliness of a sci-fi like Edge of Tomorrow.
Luckily, Pratt & Lawrence are great together. So much so that you forget they are spitting out painfully melodramatic dialogue. If they weren't the actors they were, this could pass as a TV movie with the script. I'm not surprised, considering Jon Spaiht's also wrote Doctor Strange this year, a film I wasn't too keen on.
One of the major appeals to the film was the mystery surrounding the two waking up. Because of that, I was always engaged and intrigued as to the film's direction. With that said, I can't say it's a film I would ever be inclined to watch again. A great premise was really just turned into a mediocre romantic sci-fi. Everything was surface level and nothing really felt inspired. It's a disappointment overall, adding to the extremely long list of underwhelming blockbusters this year. Oh well.
+Romantic chemistry
+Always invested
-But it isn't rewatchable
-Weak dialogue
-A great premise turned out to be a surprisingly uninspired result
5.9/10