The coolest people we know, Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence finally pair up together for a sci fi tthe time we reach its end, the damage is too gigantic to recover from. The solemnity with which the movie had actually begun and crawled forward with, ends up becoming quite vapid for even a romantic movie. However, the movie still manages to literally hyperdrive.
Plot of Passengers Movie (Spoilers Ahead)
Passengers takes off brilliantly when it begins. Its beauty lingered in its stunning unravelling, the slow revelation of its intriguing plot.
The flick commences with an engineer Jim Preston waking up from a hibernation pod in a starship called Avalon, only to realize he had awakened too soon. His entire crew is headed towards a planet similar to that of earth called Homestead II. Now he can’t go back to sleep because the Avalon’s pods don’t work that way. He realizes there was still a good 90 years left for the ship to reach its destination, that he was a surefire ill-fated quietus.
There is only one person, er, android on the entire ship, he could have a real conversation with. The humanoid named Arthur played by Michael Sheen is a pleasant company to keep when the chips are down. The pilot area is barred by a door that can’t be opened without an authorized security bracelet. So all his efforts to enter the room goes in vain.
“The universe is not evil but it has a nasty sense of humor.”
The Sleeping Beauty
The twist in the tale arrives when Jim struggles to live insanity for more than an year, eventually deciding to give up. However, too scared to take his life, he comes across a sleeping beauty named Aurora Lane played by Jennifer Lawrence who changes the way he looks at life. He checks her files, recorded videos to find out more about her eventually falling for her hard. He decides to live, and within his countless confabs with Arthur admits an unwarranted wish to wake her up, even though it was downright unscrupulous.
Blinded by love, he ends up manually overriding Aurora’s hibernation pod. Without telling her who or what caused her pod failure he allows her to fall in love with him. Smitten with each other their destiny begins to write itself in their slow impending doom.
Stranded Destiny
It is that sense of wretchedness that swallows Aurora just like it does to us, when there’s nothing to do. When you feel constantly stranded on a planet with nothing substantial to work upon.
“I envy you Arthur. You have a purpose.”
Things run smooth, until one day Arthur, the android to whom Jim had confided in, spills the beans. It is this turmoil that destroys whatever Jim had so diligently built. Mad at Jim for waking her up before time, and considering it murder, she refuses to see his face or even listen to him.
Meanwhile Avalon has encountered numerous damages and is definitely going to blow up if they didn’t do something about it. Wakes up Chief Deck officer, Gus Mancuso portrayed by Laurence Fishburne with the authority to enter the room they had failed to enter. On being told by Aurora of what Jim did to her, Gus reasons with:
“The drowning man will always try to take someone down with him.”
This makes you wonder, it always takes a third person’s perspective to see something that stays clouded by your judgment. Even though Gus put it in her head, it was enough to think why Jim did what he did in the first place. Though not justified, for the first time she took things from his perspective.
You can order the Passengers movie from here:
The Final Part
The climactic part deals with Gus passing away, handing over the reins of the ship into the hands of its two intact passengers. Identifying the cause as an asteroidal damage that had fried up Avalon’s reactors, both work to set things straight. However, since the system is fried, and the reactor is out of control, Jim decides to go manual on it trying to vent it out. It is this ultimate sacrifice that has Aurora convinced about his huge significance, begging him to come back alive.
You can’t get so hung up on where you’d rather be that you forget to make the most of where you are.
Once the reactor door opens and the heat vents out, it sends Jim flying in the air disconnected. He begins to wane when Aurora with hopes to bring him back, goes after. Back in the safety of the starship she finds him dead, but eventually performs a major Prometheus kind of pod operation on him to resuscitate him back to life.
Mawkish Vibes
Image a world that’s sleeping, and you are the only person wide awake. Doesn’t that reflect, I don’t know, life? It’s metaphorical only if the movie meant it. But I am afraid, Passengers movie is too shallow to actually mean it. It doesn’t cash in on its poetic vibes, rather focuses on what’s going on to meet the story requirements.
The chemistry starts off great, but then loses its spark. Jim suddenly feels getting sidelined, and doesn’t bank on his sea of thoughts when things begin to go south. Morten Tyldum overlooks emotional profundity, ends up eliminating pathos entirely.
Final bits are as ridiculous as a movie could get. It keeps spiraling and escalating desperate to meet a happy end. It’s hard to take things seriously, when everything keeps happening in split seconds. The movie loses its endearing riveting focus then and there, that had us spellbound so far.
Arthur: They say time heals all wounds.
Aurora: Broken Hearts aren’t that simple.
A headstrong Aurora in the end becomes a mere observer when she doesn’t know what’s going on, or what’s happening. The part where she ends up getting hit by a shard seems like weirdly input. To justify the heat of the moment!
Also, the colossal import of traveling to a distant planet, living alone for an year, diminishes when you lance it with cheap saccharine drops. That’s what the movie ends up becoming owing to that sped up ending.
Aurora: Took you long enough to ask.
Jim Preston: I was giving you space.
The Final Verdict
Passengers movie makes you think of how fate binds us despite our attempt to slingshot past it. Life can happen at the most unusual places, at weirdest junctures. So can love crisscross you on uncalled for crossroads. That fate has a funny way of dealing with things. It, in a way, teaches us to make the most of the now, forgive and live before we forget how to.
If you live an ordinary life, all you’ll have are ordinary stories. You have to live a life of adventure.
If you try hard to read between the lines, the theme of the movie stays poetic as well. It reflects everything kind of our extant lives. How two people wake up, they fall in and then out of love. Their existence in a “sleeping” world makes you believe that’s how it always works in reality too. That rare magic eludes us, then happens, only to vanish again like stardust. If we hold on to it, by forgiving each other, despite how bad the fallout is then we can truly enjoy our ride.
I laughed at a man with no pants, until I realized I have no legs.
It is just that Passengers movie is more inclined towards romance than adventure or drama. Even though the onscreen pairing of mischief is what we had been dying to see for so long, the movie doesn’t live up to the mark in terms of spell-binding gravitas that we expected from it profusely.
You die, I die.
Still it’s a movie that should not be missed owing to a story that makes you marvel at human mind.
Check out the trailer of the Passengers movie here:
Passengers
Pros
- Brilliantly Written
- Extraordinary theme
- Its poetic plot makes you reflect on life
- Brilliant Depiction of Avalon interiors and exteriors
Cons
- Missing Gravitas
- Chemistry of actors fades gradually
- Ending seems weirdly forced
- Poetic vibes not cashed in on enough
Comments
This is by far the best movie I have seen in a very long time! How many times is Hollywood going to sel me the same fairy tale the same marvel comic story. Finally something new! Hollywood you boys and girls need to find yourselves some new talent with new fresh ideas! This is a fine example of such a movie!!!