Sappy romance disguised as sci-fi movie

Rating: 4/10 (1 January 2017)

Passengers is a simple story of two people stranded on a desert island who get in love because there is nobody else available nearby. That sums it up, but the official plot line is the following: in a not too near future Earth is overcrowded (surprise surprise) and a big corporation offers the opportunity (at high price) to go to live on new terraformed planets. As they don't FTL most of the travel has to be done in cryogenic stasis on the space equivalent of a transatlantic. They are supposed to stay asleep for 120 years, but the impact with an asteroid 30 years after the departure causes a lot of tiny malfunctioning, including one chamber. A mechanical engineer is awaken on the ghost ship, he doesn't have access to the bridge of the chambers of the crew, the automatic robots on the ship are of no help and the most human face is the android of the lounge bar. After one year of getting mad he decides to awake another passenger, an attractive journalist, without of course telling her he has done on purpose, as in every relation based on a lie everything goes great until she finds out the truth...in the meantime the small malfunctioning escalate until the entire ship is in danger of self destruction... I don't think it's necessary to add anything else, while a fan of sci-fi movies of the same type (in particular Pandorum, a forgotten movie from years ago deals with the same scenario in more horror way and it's way superior to passengers) I found this film disappointing at best. The entire premise of the movie, that a company will build a completely automatized ship that doesn't allow to return in stasis, is simply ludicrous for a mechanical engineer (like me) used to work with the concept of "risk assessment", the right solution for these scenarios are to wake up at least some members of the crew to check the ship and let them return in stasis once they are sure everything goes fine. The idea of not letting anybody to access to the vital systems of the ship is simply criminal, but it's a plot device to allow the love story to go on. The cast indeed is good, Lawrence is a great actress and fills the screen even in stupid movies like this one, his sidekick is also good, Fishburne is the best even if he has less screen time, and also, and Sheen perfect in the role of the android barman, even if I find his weasel smile quite untrustworthy and I was always thinking he would have tried to kill the protagonists sooner or later. In conclusion as a sci-fi movie is awful and disappointing, but I assume the female audience will love that. As I already written, I would recommend to watch the lesser known Pandorum, an office flop but a more satisfying movie all around.