Attention-catching and unique, but a bit droll

Rating: 7/10 (5 February 2017)

Passengers has a good story line, acceptable acting, decent direction, and absolutely incredible sets and CGI. The movie is both slow paced and fast paced in just the right amounts, with the pace fitting the context of the script. It is entertaining, exciting and draws the viewer quickly into the plot and holds us there.
The downside is an anticlimactic plot element. Neither the director nor the actors make the resolution of the film believable. At the end I found myself wondering about different ways they could have ended it better... and that's never good.
Mind you, how they ended it was okay, just kind of... lacking that certain something that makes a person say "Wow, that was a great film." It's an interesting film. But if not for the spectacular sets there isn't much here that would set it apart from class-B scifi with good CGI.
The sets are incredible. THIS is a generation ship in all its glory. The only thing that could have made them better would have been 3 or 4 more sets just as grandiose. The set design was unique, creative, and fine. The bar-- a central area to both ship and plot-- is a great bar, with a very pleasant android (no spoiler there... shown in the commercials) that is both well-acted and essential to the plot.
Neither actor really brought out the emotion one would expect in the situations presented. Whether this was poor casting or poor directing is difficult to tell, but imo neither part is pulled off well. They came across like actors playing a part; this is one film in which unknowns might have been better cast as the leads. The characters are almost static, expected and predictable all the way through. In truth, there's only one scene in the film that one might consider unexpected, and it's at the very end. The rest of it, although brilliantly presented and filmed, is somewhat cliché.
One of the biggest problems of the film was a plot device. When one of the characters does something morally and ethically questionable, the film just never seems to succeed in overcoming that. Nothing that happens thereafter succeeds in overcoming that major hurdle. It tries, and provides a particularly good "illustration" in attempt to resolve the matter (no spoilers!)... but in whole it just falls flat by creating a non-sympathetic character.
Overall this show is well worth seeing. There are good moments in it. It's just that at the end one feels that the spaceship was the real star of the film.