Romantic Disaster in Space

Rating: 1/10 (25 December 2016)

The trailer for 'Passengers' promises mystery and suspense, but the finished product is just a luke-warm romance spiced up with some tepid thrills at the conclusion. Its threadbare plot kicks off several hundred years in the future, with a spaceship encountering comet debris a quarter way through its 120 year journey to another solar system. The vessel sustains damage and starts to malfunction, awakening one of the 5000 hibernating colonists aboard. With no way to put himself back to sleep, this unlucky Jim faces the dismal prospect of spending the rest of his life alone on the vessel. Unaware of a growing crisis in the ship's vitals, Jim passes the next year discussing his dilemma with a supercilious android bartender, playing solo basketball and unsuccessfully trying to break into the sleeping crew's quarters to seek help. Eventually he decides to wake another colonist - an airhead journalist called Aurora - for some company and romance.
After this so-so set-up, it's soon clear screenwriter Spaihts has nowhere to go, and his script's most appropriate destination would have been the Black Hole of a producer's waste-bin. The 'Prometheus' debacle should have purged Spaihts of his obsession with interstellar basketball and smug androids, but apparently not, because Jim and Aurora's embarrassing flirtations are portrayed through extra basketball practice and more chats with the Jeeves-bot bartender. After some disco-dancing classes, the ship's system failures become impossible to ignore, and this juvenile melodrama limps into its half-baked climax.