Threadbare soap opera in space or Boring People Feel Despair

Rating: 1/10 (22 January 2017)

I've made poor decisions in my life, but paying 12eur to see this film without researching it a little has got to top them all if measured by the misery I felt watching it. The only reason why I didn't walk out ~40mins in is that I didn't come alone. To avoid ranting, here are the reasons in bullet points:

Poor acting. I'm only familiar with Chris Pratt as a comedy actor, and based on Passengers he's better off in his lane. Limited emotivity and emotional range in the context. His last man on earth entertaining himself intersected with blips of despair routine felt like a less effective imitation of Will Smith's in I am Legend. What happened to Jennifer Lawrence since Winter's Bone I will never know. It feels like she may have expended all the nuance and subtlety there and only has routine-issue single emotion faces to display. Laurence Fishburne and Michael Sheen both did their thing. Which is, display complex emotion while asleep. They weren't exactly given much to work with. Which segues me into..

Insipid, regurgitated dialogue. Uncharacteristically, I felt like quipping sarcastically at the screen pretty much the whole time. The lines were so typical, lifeless and expected, I felt like I'm in Premonition. *Spoiler* The captain of the ship dies, says something casually humorous in that cliché heartbreaking way before about women appreciating a man in a uniform. The ship is breaking down, and the writer says "So we're in a ship that's sinking". Perhaps you were born yesterday and have never seen a film before and found this profound. I cannot fault you. Alas, I. simply. can't. stomach. recycled. garbage.*End spoiler* The regurgitated feeling extends to other criteria as well, from visuals to character types.

Frankensteinian, empty plot: It feels like you're watching barest motifs of actual sci-fi films stitched together last minute/unoriginally. Except that even these motifs are just used to prop the "love story". Which brings me to..

The film revolves around a love story that's, once again, just a stitched up collection of poorly executed clichés. Falling in love with a stranger who you don't know, getting together because there's literally no one else around, The Secret That Ruins Everything Whoops, Female In Anger Won't Listen To Empathy But After Tremendous Selfless Sacrifice She Will Forgive Immediately, and so on endlessly. The problem here is that I'm not merely recognizing tropes, the plot line is really just a sequence of clichés, there's no character substance - let alone development - to flesh anything out.

One-dimensional universe we know or care little about. It's a far off future. It feels realistically capitalistic in an unassuming, normative kind of way. People emigrate from earth because it's crowded and some jobs are almost obsolete. But that's irrelevant because love story. Space travel is just a cardboard background for it, that is all.

Passengers is a simpletonic, flat attempt to make money because Jennifer Lawrence in space is in love, then sad, then in love again. I couldn't even enjoy it as mindless entertainment because it was a soulkilling drag. Don't waste your money or worse, your precious time on planet earth, yeah?