In The Cosmos With Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt

Rating: 9/10 (10 April 2017)

Even with Hollywood's decades-long infatuation with CGI, which has caused the cost of such films to escalate into the $100-200 million range, there are moments of levity when such visual effects are put to solid use in the service of a story and not to the salaries of the effects men generating them, nor even necessarily to what studios think the audience might want. During the second decade of the 21st century, we have had at least three films that fit such a bill: 2013's GRAVITY (with George Clooney and Sandra Bullock); 2014's INTERSTELLAR (with Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway); and 2015's THE MARTIAN (with Matt Damon). And in 2016, there was a fourth film to join this illustrious group: PASSENGERS, a combination of intergalactic romance and science fiction.
The setting is aboard the starship Avalon, on a 120-year journey across the galaxy to a place called Homestead II, a new interstellar colony. The crew number 258, and the total number of civilian passengers five thousand—all of whom are in a deep state of hibernation, to be awakened within four months of reaching Homestead II, which Avalon is traveling to at half the speed of light. But something on the ship has gone haywire, and one of the hibernation pods has allowed a deep-space engineer (Chris Pratt) to awaken a mere thirty years into the journey, meaning that he will almost certainly die before anyone else awakens. In spending a full year in trying to find the cause of the hibernation malfunction, he also awakens a female journalist (Jennifer Lawrence); and they work at figuring out what has actually gone wrong. In the course of exploring the ship, and despite Lawrence's extreme rancor at Pratt having awakened her way too soon, they not only try to find a solution to an incredibly complex practical issue, but also find the chance to fall in love with whatever time they have left. A third person (Laurence Fishburne), a member of the crew (all of whom are still somehow in hibernation), assists them in finding the cause of Avalon's malfunction; and unfortunately it is actually hundreds of little problems morphing into one huge intergalactic nightmare.
Morton Tyldum, a Norwegian director whose previous credits included the highly acclaimed 2014 World War II docudrama THE IMITATION GAME, manages to make what could have been a potentially sticky and sentimental deep space film, courtesy of screenwriter Joe Spaihts (who co-wrote the screenplay for director Ridley Scott's 2012 sci-fi/horror opus PROMETHEUS), into something far more substantial and thought-provoking than a lot of critics, and even some audiences, have given it credit for. Certainly Pratt and Lawrence make for an appealing pair; and the potential for them having passionate lovemaking is there at certain points of the film. In the end, though, the focus is on survival and the inherent dangers of both interstellar travel and technology that doesn't always work the way we might want it to. Much like both GRAVITY and INTERSTELLAR, PASSENGERS has a few distinct homages to director Stanley Kubrick's 1968 sci-fi masterpiece 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, as well as to Steven Spielberg's A.I.: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE and MINORITY REPORT, and the 2008 Disney film WALL-E. But just for good measure, in the early parts of the film, there is an android bartender named Arthur (Michael Sheen), who looks like a dead ringer for Lloyd, the supernatural bartender portrayed by Joe Turkel in Kubrick's 1980 horror classic THE SHINING; and even the expansive set of the lounge has the look (albeit in the height of high tech) of the Gold Room in that film.
The scattered action sequences keep PASSENGERS from seeming too cerebral and slow (a criticism still lodged against "2001" by critics who really should know better), but the spacious production design and the CGI depictions of deep space keep the film from being a testosterone fest, and grounded in a certain amount of reality, again much like GRAVITY and INTERSTELLAR. Lawrence, known for her roles in the Hunger Games franchise and JOY, and Pratt, who starred in the 2015 box office smash JURASSIC WORLD, anchor the film's human element; and Newman, whose many scores include WALL-E and BRIDGE OF SPIES, among many others, provides a great music score of a very neo-futuristic kind. At a time when really good filmmaking that involves special effects work is hard to find, and total suspension of disbelief is all too easy to find, PASSENGERS illustrates just how well a certain sense of cosmic wonder, realism, and humanity can come off in 21st century Hollywood.