Passengers review

Passengers is a film about a man who is woken up early while on a ship travelling to a new planet, and after a year of being isolated from human contact wakes up a woman.

Did the trailers mis-market this film: yes. Am I going to complain about it: no. Passengers is deeply flawed. The story is mainly uninteresting, as are the characters, and when it tries to bring up moral questions it doesn't handle them well at all. Chris Pratt does well with what he's given and I've never been a fan of Jennifer Lawrence's, and I was really disappointed because it had an interesting concept and a good director.

Spoilers because it has been a month and is too late to do this as it's own thing
Personally I understand why Chris Pratt woke up Jennifer Lawrence, but I don't agree with his reasoning and how he went through with it.

So Pratt is alone for a year with only Michael Sheen's robot bartender for company. He then accidentally stumbles upon Lawrence's hibernation pod and proceeds to learn everything about her before waking her up under the pretence that she woke up for the same unknown reasons he did. I found this really creepy but not once is Pratt vilified for what he's done and is usually seen sympathetically, even when Lawrence brings it up and hates him for it. He essentially picks the person he decides to strand on the ship with him, almost as if they were a toy in a store, without giving much thought about their situation as a whole.

I have seen several other posts by people asking "What if Jennifer Lawrence had woken up Chris Pratt?". It would be the same creepy concept and wouldn't help improve it. The same if it were two people of the same gender.

All the problems on the ship in the film are caused by the ship malfunctioning. They make the hibernation pods to be un-failable. They never say this about the ship. We see shots of an ever increasing number of error messages appear in the bridge, and there is nothing done by the ship to fix it. No crew are woken up to fix it, nothing happens. And if a crew member is woken up they might be able to solve the whole hibernation pod problem.

Also, as I'm ranting, I might as well give my thoughts on the pay issue. For those who don't know Lawrence wrote an essay on pay equality after the Sony hack revealed she was paid less than her co-stars in American Hustle. She blamed herself for her negotiating power(if I remember right). I can't comment on her screen time there but I keep meaning to watch it and I haven't got round to it yet. So then she and Pratt sign on to this film and it's revealed Lawrence is getting paid around $20 million while Pratt is paid around $12-15 million. This would be more understandable if the roles were reversed, but Pratt has a lot more screen time than Lawrence so it would make more sense if he were paid more. Or, even better, if they are paid equally, as they are both big stars whom people like.

In short: It's not good.