Lawrence carries (just barely) this middle of the road sci-fi yarn.

Rating: 6/10 (12 August 2017)

*** This Review May Contain Spoilers! ***
As far as sci-fi goes, I'd put Passengers in the middle of the road. CGI was passable with some nice eye candy - clearly they spent a few bucks on it. The story, though, was sub par - boy meets girl in outer space, they get in on, they have a fight, and boy has to do something really far out to win girl back. Pratt's acting was not bad, and the chemistry between him and Lawrence was a plus yet I felt that Jennifer Lawrence's presence and acting skills carried the film. And what guy, unless he was gay, wouldn't want to get marooned in deep space with Jennifer Lawrence? I'm certainly in - at least for a couple of weeks
About halfway through the film Chris Pratt had a solo scene, and low and behold, a fly danced around his head - this, of course happening after coming out of 30 years of suspended animation. I rewound a bit and played back the scene to be sure - yep, the little guy definitely flew in for a cameo. You'd think in a CGI extravaganza that someone would have done a bit of touch-up. But I guess they hadn't booked enough time in the editing room.
The pool was killer, complete with a huge dome-like glass window extending out the ship's side revealing an eye-popping starry panorama. The only problem with this picture was that the habitable portion of the gargantuan ship was rotating to simulate earth's gravity and the view through the window looking out from the pool had the stars in a fixed position. Whoops!
Speaking of gravity, when push came to shove near the end of the film, a worsening system-wide power failure killed the power and along with it the gravity. Everything just began floating around in zero Gs. Good for special effects maybe, but the visuals in the film went to great lengths again and again to show this huge habitable superstructure rotating to generate its gravitational field. The power failure shouldn't have had any effect upon the ship's gravity. Either they didn't care or the writer has to brush up on his physics.