![]() The way that “Passengers” forces Jim to weigh his choice, and puts the audience in his shoes, seems responsible enough. ![]() He knows that doing so is indefensible (it’s like playing God), but he also knows that if he doesn’t make the decision to screw someone else over, he’s going to go crazy. The question is: Will he rouse a fellow passenger, 90 years before she’s scheduled to wake up, in order to save himself? Jim tries to make a go of things, but after too many days of eating, drinking, and one-man hologram dance-offs, he enters his Jim Morrison-on-the-skids phase. Pratt, beneath the jock sexiness, is a fine actor who lets his eyes dance with playful intent, and with a dash of panic. (No information leaks out, even if your life depends on it.) The situation Jim finds himself in is a gnawing nightmare it’s as if he’d been sentenced to die alone, in 50 years, of boredom. ![]() The Avalon is like an abandoned cruise ship, and the movie serves up some witty tweaks of top-down corporate culture, like the way that Jim can’t order a first-rate cup of coffee (because he’s not a Gold Star passenger), or the fact that he can’t get through to anyone back on earth, because everything on the ship is programmed to stonewall you. He’s surrounded by chirpy holograms and talking food dispensers - but there’s no other live human. ![]() It doesn’t take long for him to realize, though, that something is amiss. Too bad! Because for its opening 45 minutes or so, “Passengers” is a reasonably cunning slice of commercial sci-fi, even as it overtly recycles the strategies of films like “The Martian” and “Moon.” When Jim first wakes up, he thinks the voyage of the Avalon is complete (the passengers are scheduled to come out of hibernation four months before the end of the journey). The scene is a harbinger of what’s to come, since the two actors spend the rest of the movie going through the motions of what turns out to be a flavorless and rather predictable fable. But in “Passengers,” the big romantic spacewalk is so perfunctory and visually rote that it’s about as stunning as a glimpse out the window of an airplane cruising over Cleveland. The two don heavy-duty suits and, hanging by a tether, venture outside the ship, into the starry vastness, at which point you may flash back to other visions of flying human rapture - Christopher Reeve whisking Margot Kidder through the night sky in “Superman,” or George Clooney and Sandra Bullock (though they were just pesky colleagues) bobbing around in the awesome void of “Gravity.” In different ways, both those movies made your heart skip a beat. They get to know each other and go on a “date,” at which point Jim tells Aurora that he’d like to take her to a place that’s “the best show in town.” He’s talking about a deep-space walk. Since they happen to look like Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt (stranded in space, you could do worse), it starts to seem like things will work out. The two have all the food, alcohol, and entertainment they could want there’s a basketball court, a video dance floor, and an elegant if empty bar presided over by a red-jacketed android named Arthur, played by Michael Sheen like the chipper robot cousin of Lloyd the bartender in “The Shining.” But unless either Jim or Aurora manages to live another 90 years or so, this voyage is going to eat up the remainder of their existence, and they’ve got no one but each other to keep each other company.
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