Passengers
Last night I watched “Passengers,” a movie that was made in 2016 and can roughly be described as science fiction. It’s no masterpiece, but I liked it, which is more than I can say for most movies I see these days (which is not too many).
I was surprised to see that, according to the critics, the movie was considered awful, although audiences seemed to like it.
Count me with the audiences. The film has a dull title, is kind of static, some plot points are shaky, and the action sequences that come towards the end are formulaic and predictable. But the film has an unusual combination of other pluses: effective acting, good design and sets, a great robot, a fabulous special effects scene involving a swimming pool and—perhaps most interesting of all—a plot that involves some pretty heavy-duty questions about ethics under extraordinary conditions, love, forgiveness, and what makes a meaningful and productive life.
Not bad at all.
Overall I thought the movie was interesting. I went in expecting it to be decent but not brilliant, so I was satisfied. I would have changed the ending, though.
shadow:
If you can say—without divulging the plot so that you ruin it for anyone who hasn’t yet seen it—what sort of ending you’d prefer, I’d be curious to hear.
I’ll have to check this out. The trailer is quite long and interesting.
Averages of critics ratings are almost entirely useless. If you can find a critic or two you like, is much better. Perhaps critics hate Jennifer Lawrence. I think she is decent. Early in her career she got shortchanged on her pay, but she really cleaned up on this one.
The trivia on Passengers reminds me of The Player (1992). In that film a screenwriter spends most of the film trying to pitch his latest script with a very unconventional ending to directors and producers. At the end of The Player, the character’s film gets made, but the ending is completely changed/bastardized.
Apparently, the script for Passengers got shopped around for years, and the actual film had the third act completely rewritten.
The storyline sounds a bit similar to the old Twilight Zone episode “The Long Morrow.” A young man and woman fall in love right before he alone has to go into 70 years of hibernation aboard a spacecraft.
This was used in the series Gilmore Girls. The young lady lead’s boyfriend leaves for Europe for months, and his parting gift to her is a model rocket. It is an exact replica of the rocket used in The Long Morrow, which the two of them had seen on late night reruns of The Twilight Zone some weeks prior.
Make that 40 years of hibernation.
Since the edit function is permanently gone, is there a possibility for a preview function? I like the old one.
Stories about “Generation ships” and deep sleep travel are a major sub-genre in Science Fiction and Fantasy literature.
I really liked it. I would have given it 4.5 of 5 stars. And, you are right: the special effects are amazing.
TommyJay:
I can’t find plugins that work for either preview or edit at the moment. I have someone working on it, but it’s very slow going so far. I hope to discover a solution in the not too distant future.
The critics’ judged Passengers as boring because it is not emotional enough. Or so two of the reviews claim.
They also demote it, they imply, because the future is glossy – and therefore not wretchedly anxious and dystopian enough; and the people neither mentally troubled enough or ugly enough.
Thus, in my estimation, their reviews say more about the reviewers’ own dubiousness as functional humans than about any movie in particular.
“Passengers” is a modest aiming, interesting, and ultimately optimistic movie – if flawed in the manner of all movies which present the the logic, the options, and the choices they choose to present, rather than the alternatives and choices you have thought up while watching the film.
It is therefore a worthwhile distraction compared to the usual brainless “SciFi” fare featuring dancing squids, prostitute midgets, and world weary starfighter pilots slouching over an outer world bar as an orchestra of phlegm dripping mutants plays bebop in the background.
I don’t personally care for Jennifer Lawrence at all. Meaning I don’t find her sexually attractive or particularly sympathetic. She even seems to be morphing into a kind of Renee Zellweger, though I do not say that that is a particularly bad thing. There probably is an open slot in the actor catalog that needs to be filled now that Zellweger is no longer the Zellweger of Cold Mountain days. But that said, Lawrence plays her role very, very, well.
As for Pratt, whether it reflects his real personality or his acting I don’t know; but Chris Pratt hits the tone just right in my estimation.
General: You can fast forward past a couple of “passion” scenes without too much trouble. I don’t know why anyone who has come to sympathize with the characters who show admirable traits and decency prior to falling in love, would voyeuristic-ally want to watch them go at it, to the mild extent they do, anyway. The scenes are probably obligatory; but you would no more want to sit through them than you would want to witness your brother in bed with his wife …
Sheen … is outstanding; and the theme of the meaning of his ersatz humanity is worth pondering.
Some elements were a bit anomalous I suppose. I kept asking myself why the principals were dressed like the people you know nowadays. But then, many movies seek to put their characters in a kind of neutral “any era” garb.
The idea of “classic” music from the rock era though, played 300 or however many years from now, is probably some personal conceit worked into the film by the writer, director, or producer. Very annoying, if brief.
That line in Prometheus, which Idris Elba utters about having Stephen Still’s concertina, is a similarly dopey and indefensibly anachronistic reference worked in just to please someone … maybe Ridley Scott himself. Even the fact that Charlize Theron’s character has no idea who Stills is, doesn’t prevent the disruptive moment of self-indulgent fist-bumping from jarring.
As for “Passengers”, I watched it on DVD twice. Almost never do that.
Pacing, is another critic’s complaint. I’ don’t know why there seems to be a not yet fully parallel that occurs to me, but it does; so, think of the movie
“Lost in Translation”, if you found it unbearably slow, you may find this ‘man (and woman) out of place’ movie slow too. But I’d rather watch one good if slowly developing movie, than a thousand been there done that car chases and exploding toy spaceships.
Geez … EDIT would help.
Retry:
Pacing, is another critics’ complaint. I don’t know why, but there seems to be a not yet fully developed in my own mind parallel with another movie, which occurs to me. But it does: so, think of the movie “Lost in Translation”.
If you found it unbearably slow, then you may find this ‘man (and woman) out of place’ movie too slow too.
But I’d rather watch one good, if slowly developing movie, than a thousand been-there-done-that car chases and exploding toy spaceships.
I’m with you, saw it in a theater, although almost skipped it due to the negative consensus critical opinion. Fortunately a contrarian take from someone I respected got me out to it, kind of wondered what the critic’s problem was after I saw it. Really liked the look of the movie, and of course the story.
Ok, y’all convinced me to put it on my Netflix list. Though I kind of expect Netflix to expel me any day now because I live in one of the states contacts with which would make them feel morally soiled.
While I’m here: I don’t know if Arrival was ever discussed here. That’s another recent sci-fi effort that I thought was very good.
Btw there is also a 2008 film named Passengers. Described as a “thriller.”
Passengers is a very good movie; and it is the kind of movie that makes me ignore critics – they often get it wrong! While the two main actors are good, Michael Sheen is brilliant!
I thought the pacing was exactly right, and in service of the plot. The whole point at first was “too much time” and “human need for companionship.” I thought the slow development, both of his decision and then of the relationship, highlighted those themes.
Why does noone mention the bartender?
Totally worth it for the bartender alone.
Saw it last night. My wife & I really like it, and she’s not a big fan of the genre.
Michael Sheen is a fine actor and I very much enjoyed his roll as the bartender Arthur. BTW, that whole barroom routine was borrowed from Kubrick’s “The Shining” because one of the filmmaker’s was fond of it. “What’ll it be Mr. Torrance?”
I was especially amused by Sheen’s bartender acting because I had previously read that he was quoted as having said the his character was “a cross between a puppy and a toaster.”
Not that most would care, but I’d rate the physics accuracy at about a B in the first two acts, and a D or F in the third act. The spaceship spin and resulting artificial gravity would not stop just because the electricity fails. Conservation of angular momentum and all that.
As gratuitous as much of that third act “action” was, it did serve the psychological purpose of re-bonding Jim and Aurora through adversity, given that the Act 3 begins with them on the outs.
We are all “passengers” on this Earth.
Who is the “we” you are speaking of?
Tim Broberg:
I mentioned the bartender. I just didn’t call him a bartender. He is the “great robot” of my last paragraph in the post.
I suppose that technically he’s an android, but an android is a type of robot. And he’s only an android from the waist up; from the waist down he’s pure robot.
One point that sticks in my craw. The Jennifer Lawrence line, “I’m a journalist, I know people.” That certainly doesn’t describe many of today’s journalists who seem to define people by their own preconceptions rather than knowing them for who they are.
eeyore on June 3, 2019 at 7:45 pm said:
It certainly describes their conceits, if not their actual capabilities. And as you recall, he disproved her claim in 2 out of three cases.
It was an interesting film, watched while donating platelets yesterday. Thanks for the recommendations.
}}} At the end of The Player, the character’s film gets made, but the ending is completely changed/bastardized.
Tommy, this is pretty SOP in Hollywood. It happens far more than you’d thing, as a direct result of many different possible factors — if the director has one vision, the writer another. Or if the studio has an opinion.
Even Hitchcock wasn’t immune. The ending of Suspicion (1940) was the polar opposite of its intended one, because the studio did not want their rising star, Cary Grant, to be a Bad Guy.
In other cases, there was a crappy script about space battles vs. Bugs. A copyright search noted that Robert Heinlein’s classic Starship Troopers was about… fighting bugs. They bought the rights to it, but the director, Paul Verhoeven, hated the book, and stopped reading it well short of the halfway point. So they took some elements from it, and produced a version that depicted the government therein in almost the diametric opposite of what it actually was — Verhoeven even stole a number of ideas for the government from Nazi films he’d seen decades before.
}}} but an android is a type of robot.
Technically, no, but you’d be hard-pressed to understand the difference from films.
Historically, in SF, a robot is a mechanical artificial life form. An android is a biological artificial life form — that is, a robot will mostly have gears, metal, wires, motors, perhaps a metal sponge for the brain. An android will have actual muscles, bones, tendons, etc., all the stuff a normal human will have. They just were in no way created by normal human/animal creation processes (e.g., a “vat-grown human” is not an android, unless you at least imprinted its personality directly onto the brain, rather than had it learn as a human does over time).
Most of the idiots in Hollywood have no clue about any of this, so they use the words interchangeably in TV and film.
OBloodyHell:
I called the bartender a robot in the post, but in one of my comments I wrote:
And I believe that is correct in the case of the movie; is it not?