Despite starring two of the most high-profile young actors currently working in Hollywood, the Chris Pratt/Jennifer Lawrence sci-fi two-hander Passengers has largely been kept under lock and key ahead of its release next week. Could it be another Oscar player for Lawrence? Or a $150 million misfire?
Reviews for the film are finally trickling out, and it’s not pretty. While critics are generally praising of the film’s set design and some of its loftier philosophical themes, they seem to agree it ultimately goes a little haywire.
One of the key complaints, which isn’t spoiled in any of the below extracts, concerns a major plot-point about 40 minutes into the film, which lends an element of moral unpleasantness to the proceedings that the film awkwardly fails to confront.
Kate Erbland (IndieWire)
Passengers refuses to really wrestle with the compelling questions at its core, instead opting to lean on Lawrence and Pratt’s collective charm to keep things ticking amiably along. The problem is, this isn’t an amiable story — it’s a philosophically thorny one, and aiming to keep things light doesn’t dilute any of its issues, it just dumbs the entire outing down. “Titanic” in space? No, but it’s certainly a disaster.
Chris Nashawaty (Entertainment Weekly)
Lawrence is relegated to being a pretty helpless damsel in distress when the Avalon’s systems start to fail. She’s way too good of an actress to be told to look scared and shout lines like “What does that mean?!” when technical terms are thrown around, and “Jim, how do we fix this?!”
Eric Eisenberg (Cinema Blend)
By the time Passengers hits its underwhelming finale, you almost wish that it didn’t start out so strong, just because it’s basically all a set up for disappointment. There are so many things that go right with the film – from its stars performances to really beautiful and creative production design – but its legitimate failure to stick the landing both leaves a bad taste in your mouth, and actually compromises its internal ethics in a sour way.
Tom Huddleston (Time Out)
A creaky romantic drama that’s more dubious the more you think about it, followed by a spot of ropey late-in-the-day spaceship action.
Owen Gleiberman (Variety)
There’s not much to Passengers besides its one thin situation… The ship itself has a variety of chambers and communal spaces, but it all seems overly familiar and sterile. What’s lackluster about Passengers isn’t just that the movie is short on surprise, but that it’s like a castaway love story set in the world’s largest, emptiest shopping mall in space.
Andrew Pulver (The Guardian)
Passengers’ preoccupation with its romcom chops means that, despite all the fancy electronics and stark minimalist design, actual peril is in short supply. Even the showpiece scene where Lawrence is engulfed by swimming-pool water after the shipboard gravity fails is a nicely realised idea, but never remotely is her emergence from the water, hair slightly ruffled, ever in doubt.
Sheri Linden (Hollywood Reporter)
Given the imaginative setup and the material’s provocative questions about mortality — not to mention the future of humankind — the movie’s neat lessons about the nature of happiness and a life well lived feel too easy, too obvious.
