Offers a Controversial Ethical Dilemma

Rating: 8/10 (28 December 2016)

Passengers follows the 120-year trip of the spacecraft Avalon to an off-world colony, carrying over five thousand passengers looking to start a new life. Unfortunately something goes wrong along the way and Jim is woken up from hibernation early - ninety years early. He finds himself alone on a luxury cruiser where his travel bracelet will only allow him basic amenities, with only an android barman for company. Slightly spoilerish, but I will be discussing at length: After a year of painful loneliness, Jim discovers Aurora's pod, is captivated by her beauty, watches her boarding logs and reads her books and falls into an obsessive infatuation that leads him, out of desperation, to decide to wake her up and condemn her to spending the rest of her life aboard the Avalon, just like him.
It's this moral and ethical dilemma that drives the film's most interesting premise, and is the most controversial part of the film that has people and critics up in arms. To me, this is where the film's biggest strength lies. It turns Jim from a charming and likable chap into something a bit more grey and murky. The film posits to it's audience; what would you do in his situation? There's no denying it's an awful choice to make, to condemn someone to your fate. It's far more noble to suffer the malfunction by yourself rather than drag someone down with you. But if you were in that situation, facing complete loneliness without any human contact for the rest of your life? Everyone would be tempted, and most I'd gladly wager would come to the same conclusion as Jim.
The movie's third act moves this ethical foundation to the sidelines in favour of a more bombastic climax, as Jim and Aurora discover that the ship's problems extend much further than just some malfunctioning hibernation pods, and the lives of the other five thousand crew and passengers are at stake. From a narrative standpoint, the third act does little than to add a bit more excitement for more attention-deficient viewers, and unite Jim and Aurora to lead to a more bittersweet close. If I was directing this movie, there are probably a few different avenues I'd have liked to have attempted that would've changed the tone of the film a little more. It was a premise rife for a mystery. Say, if it opened with Aurora waking up and being greeted by this handsome gentleman that she slowly falls for, it would've lent a bit of mystery as to the surroundings of her waking up, and could've been used to place some suspicion on Jim and paint him in a less than heroic light. Or for the ending to have a bit more of an emotional force or sense of legacy (I won't expand on that, but you can guess what I mean once you see it).
Passengers' other great strength is with the acting. You don't cast two of the most promising young stars today for no reason, and they're both worth their staggering paychecks. Chris Pratt is as effortlessly charming as ever as Jim. His first year on the ship, entirely alone, is heartbreaking, and the conflict inside him surrounding the moral dilemma is a pain to see on his face and in his body language. He certainly employs those puppy dog eyes that he does so well. Jennifer Lawrence once again proves why she's one of the most talented actresses working today. Besides the simply fantastic chemistry she shares with Pratt, a talent they both seem to share effortlessly, her own performances of love, desperation, anger, and shock are simply on another level. The moment she learns she was woken up by Jim, you can see her stomach sink at the crushing realisation of what's happened. Michael Sheen is simply great as Arthur, the android barman as well, providing words of wisdom and a deadpan expression throughout, while Laurence Fishburne and Andy Garcia never really get enough to sink their teeth into (particularly the latter, who appears for a matter of seconds and has no lines at all).
The visuals are also quite impressive. The starship Avalon itself is an impressive imaginative design, spinning some iconic tropes and clichés of sci-fi ship design that crafting itself something new. It takes the spinning circles held together by gravity, but twists them into an appearance that more resembles strands of DNA. I can't say this is an entirely realistic movie in it's treatment of space (the sun they pass is far too dark, for example), but this is sci-fi after all, and not a retelling of The Martian. Where Passengers really excels in it's visual flair are the setpieces. Every room is a physical space with smooth, clean architecture. The variation in design and colouring from the bar to the Mexican restaurant, for instance, brings life to an otherwise dead and clinical environment.
Passengers is a sci-fi that offers different questions than many other sci-fi films tend to gravitate towards. It still plays around with ethical and philosophical questions like most, but Passengers is far more controversial in it's treatment, and for me this is a strength rather than a weakness. Jim is a likable charming guy driven to something horrible by pure desperation and grief, and it shows his humanity. It shows that we all live in a grey ethical area and we can all succumb to horrible actions in extreme circumstances. Even fundamentally good people are capable of doing terrible things. I give Passengers a solid, critic-defying 8/10.