A poorly conceived "romance" film that has a plot better suited for a horror story

Rating: 3/10 (11 April 2019)

I remember checking Twitter in December 2016 and seeing the initial "reactions" towards Passengers; to say Passengers pissed off "Outrage Twitter"™ would not do the single-day uproar justice.
Saying I was mystified is an understatement.
Passengers was marketed as Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt as a couple who fall in love while alone in space on a dying spacecraft. Two giant film stars in a science fiction epic, directed by Morten Tyldum who just did The Imitation Game? Sign me up please!
Then I saw the movie years later and understood the outrage.
Passengers is the type of movie that I'd have expected to be made in 1972 with Charlton Heston and a far goofier tone. To see this film made in 2016 is almost beyond comprehension.
To accurately convey my feelings I need to go into heavy SPOILERS.
First off, the marketing was a lie; Lawrence got most of the screen time in the ads and is top-billed but she's really the supporting character to Pratt who is alone for the first act of this movie. Oh, and the ads completely made it appear that Pratt and Lawrence woke up at the same time and that there was a "reason" they woke up early...yeah, nope. If I was an audience member I'd be pissed.
Passengers is at times a great idea for a science fiction classic but then it becomes almost disgusting in the way it handles a love story that when written down comes across as something out of nightmares. One slight rewrite and this could easily have been a horror movie; or at least the science fiction version of Ingrid Goes West.
Well, before I go too far I'll give a summary. In the space-age future mankind has decided to colonize other distant worlds. On a 120 year spaceflight to a new planet, "I fix things" engineer Jim (Chris Pratt) wakes up 90 years too early when his sleep pod malfunctions as the ship goes through an asteroid field-stranding him on this giant spaceship with no way to go back to sleep. A year later, faced with spending his remaining days alone with no hope of rescue, Jim bumps into the pod of journalist Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence) and instantly gets horny for the sleeping beauty; as well as cyberstalks her like a creep by going through all the files about her on the computer. Jim wakes up Aurora by sabotaging her pod and they "fall in love" over the course of a year until-shockingly-Aurora learns that Jim basically stalked and murdered her! Luckily for Jim the ship starts to fall apart so they are forced to work together to save it while Jim risks his life to save her...you can guess where this goes.
Passengers is a tale of three acts: thought provoking, nightmare stalker love story, and boring action climax.
On the bright side I'll say the first 25 minutes of the film are good. Before the disgusting and tone-deaf love story happens and we just see Jim wander around this massive, empty ship it is rather poetic. Jim's situation is unique compared to other "alone" tales as he has access to entertainment and will never starve or likely ever get sick-Jim's only destiny is dying of old age or suicide. As time passes and Jim becomes more and more disheveled we can see what he's going through and why he might jump to the action that he did. It's just too bad that the love plot was written so horribly.
Now, I can see what Tyldum and writer Jon Spaihts were going for here: if you were stuck alone and could wake up someone else to keep you company/fall in love with, would you? It's an interesting premise for a science fiction film to tackle that is a familiar "what if" scenario. The problem is it's handled so terribly. This segment just comes across like the studio or testing audiences wanted more "drama" and thus they revamped the second act in such a way to have more traditional romantic-comedy, liar-revealed pacing. I'll at least give Passengers a bit of credit because Aurora does get suitably angry at Jim...for 10 minutes of screen time. Had Jim at all seemed guilty for what he did outside of a couple of silent glances I think it would have helped make him less detestable. Lawrence and Pratt do their best with the material and make a nice couple but it's just impossible to overcome the scripts' failures. As presented Passengers is the tale of Jim wanting to bang a hot blonde girl he bumped into that he then stalked online...seriously.
The final act of the film is also extremely boring and predictable. Big budget stars means you need an out-of-nowhere fiery action climax with explosions because they have to kiss and make up for some reason, right? Nothing better to hastily get our lovers back together than an attempted heroic sacrifice! Bonus points for being featured heavily in the trailer to misrepresent the movie!
Passengers also suffers from being contrived to fit the plot. The idea that "nothing ever malfunctions" is beaten to death as the excuse to why Jim and Aurora are stuck; why would they ever need to have emergency plans when nothing ever breaks? So when Jim wakes up and the computers can't comprehend that an error occurred, as well as the fact that the company decided to stick all important people and equipment behind impenetrable doors that only crew could open, we aren't meant to question that. Oh and how come the ship is still completely active-including a Michael Sheen bartender robot-even though it won't be used for over a century? Then we have the Laurence Fishburne cameo where he plays the dude that they conveniently need to be able to open the ship up-right after they break up but just before the action climax happens. It's all just too convenient to make this story work.
I honestly wonder if Passengers was a much cheaper production it would have been a far better product. I read that this film was originally planned for about a $40 million budget and had more reasonably priced names attached; all of which makes way more sense for a more subdued tale of Sci-Fi morality. Passengers had a budget of $110 million or more, and while pretty to look at it doesn't feel like a movie that needed to be blockbuster sized. Maybe Sony thought that they could duplicate the success of Gravity, Interstellar and The Martian as blockbuster space based "rescue" films-albeit without award hype or an effective marketing campaign. I don't know for sure, but Passengers just feels like Sony throwing money at a project in hopes that bigger equals better.
Passengers is just disappointing. A film with ambition, Passengers shows us that Pratt and Lawrence can carry a movie by themselves but can't save a movie from its own inept plot. What little hope the opening act gave us of a truly unique film quickly dissipates under the weight of a poorly thought out love story where you end up hating the characters instead of rooting for them. Beautiful sets and effects can't hide the rotten stink of contrivance to ram these two lovebirds through trials and tribulations because that's what a chart in a production studio office said to do.