Stunning visuals, good performances, hokey resolution

Rating: 6/10 (24 March 2019)

Since Star Wars, science fiction films have been compelled to wow us visually with special effects, each topping the previous with its display of grand things outside our current experience. (Unfortunately often at the neglect of plor, characterization, etc., but that's a different rant.) Passengers is a success here.
Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence are both highly talented actors, and they both did good jobs here. Quite believable, both of them.
I found pacing of the movie unsatisfying, too much time spent on build up - scene setting and buildup of the budding romance - until finally getting into the drama of danger and its resolution.
The background story of a company making sesquigazillions in money off colonizing planets that take hundreds of years for trips leaves me skeptical, but I'm willing to give that a bit of a break because its just backstory to set the scene.
My biggest complaint though is the idea of this one man being able to able to pull off saving the ship as he did. The idea is, well, he's a mechanic so he can fix stuff. The earlier part where he finds and reads a manual to figure out how to do things, OK, but coming into the climax where he has to figure out what is wrong with the ship and how to fix it, what are they going to do? I kid you not, "Look for something that's broken." Open a cabinet of electronics and look at it and say, "That looks OK". And then when they finally find the source of the problem (I'm trying very hard not to do spoilers here), under intense time pressure (so no time to read maintenance manuals) he instantly knows what has to be done and how and where.
Kinda spoiled it for me. Not sorry I watched it on TV, but if I had paid for it in a movie theater I would have been disappointed.