"I'm scared -- I'm fighting to stay calm"

Rating: 7/10 (15 April 2019)

Technology will continue its inexorable advance, but Adam will never stop desiring an Eve.
With an age-old plot line clothed in the flashiest of high-tech wrappings, along with excellent casting and acting, "Passengers" makes for one of the more satisfying space movies in memory.
Here we've got the story of working joe Jim Preston (Chris Pratt), who is hurtling at half the speed of light toward a colony of humans on a faraway space body. Upon awakening 90 years prematurely from what was supposed to be a 120-year hibernation, with 5,000 other passengers slumbering around him according to plan, Jim wrestles over whether to awaken fellow traveler Aurora Lane (Jennifer Lawrence) -- offering himself the hope of companionship but killing her chances of achieving intergalactic emigration.
I appreciated this movie's emphasis on characterization over high-tech jargon and special effects, although many scenes are visually riveting (i.e. when a sudden drop in gravity turns the spaceship's swimming pool into a life-threatening vortex).
I was unfamiliar with Pratt, but he turns in a nuanced performance here, bringing to mind fellow film hunks Josh Brolin and Christian Bale. I also liked the work of Ms. Lawrence, who believably goes from liking Jim, to wanting to kill him, to finally realizing that she wouldn't want to live without him. Also good are Laurence Fishburne in the small role of unflappable control-room techie Gus Mancuso and Andy Garcia in a cameo as the spaceship's captain.
This film poses some intriguing moral questions while poking fun at the limitations of technology. (Anyone who thinks a robot could ever replace a friend will be disabused of the notion here.) We also get some commentary on the commercialization that would inevitably follow man into the far reaches of the multiverse. For example, we learn that Jim didn't have to pay full fare for his ride to another world -- "I'm in a desirable trade," he tells Aurora. That translates into cheaper, duller food than Aurora gets at the spaceship breakfast bar.
We also observe a tweaking of the notion that technology can be trusted. Hibernation pods on the Avalon were supposed to be fail-safe. But if they had been, there wouldn't have been any story here.
In the end, this is a poignant tale about the human condition. People can careen erratically between love and enmity. But in the end, all we've really got is each other. "It ain't right," a world-weary Gus tells Aurora, "but the drowning man will always try to drag someone down with him." Ain't it the truth!