Passengers takes place on a starship called the Avalon that is traveling from Earth to a new home for mankind called Homestead II. It stars Jennifer Lawrence as Aurora Lane, Chris Pratt as Jim Preston and Michael Sheen as the android bartender Arthur.
The plot of the movie is that Pratt's character wakes up from hibernation 90 years early on a 120 year journey to Homestead II. For a good portion of the film it's just Jim and Arthur trying to figure out what to do about him waking up early. I won't go into spoilers here but Aurora wakes up more than a third into the movie. And once she wakes up the movie really starts becoming interesting. I did enjoy seeing Jim start to go a little crazy being by himself, especially a scene where he goes out in space to calm down and it's a really good emotional moment and shows off Pratt's acting ability without any dialogue. Jim is an engineer and Aurora is a writer and it's cool to see the characters come together. There's a funny scene about the breakfast choices when Aurora wakes up that I liked.
Lawrence and Pratt have great chemistry literally from the first scene they have together! I was a little worried that I wouldn't buy their relationship having seen a good bit of their interviews for this movie and how they are all very light hearted, but I did buy it by the end. They do a great job of building theses characters up and making you care about them. A scene where Aurora looks at videos of her friends she left behind and her talking about her father really give her an interesting background.
Martin Tyldum(The Imitation Game) directed the movie and he did a good job. I'm kind of a sucker for space stories where we try and find an alternate planet to replace Earth and he did a good job of not making the movie feel corny. I bought in to the serious moments. To me the stand out aspect of this movie is the music though. Thomas Newman(American Beauty) scored the film and he did an amazing job as always. It has that Mass Effect clean space music thing going on and I loved the score!
I do think the movie starts off a tad slow and it takes a while for us to see Jennifer Lawrence. Maybe I'm just a huge fan of her but I would've really liked to see her a tad earlier, or even have her wake up with Pratt. Although, I do really like why her character wakes up so i'm not sure. Also the movie is 1 hour 56 mins and that's a bit too long. This story could have been told in 1 hour 40 mins easy and they could've cut out a few filler scenes to do that. I also would've liked to have seen more androids and have that be a threat.
Overall I enjoyed the movie! If you like Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt then chances are you'll at least dig them in this movie if nothing else cause they have good chemistry. I you want a good sci-fi movie about space...you might be a tad let down with this one. It really is a love story and not a space movie.
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