Lawrence, too, is such a great screen presence that we can almost simply enjoy the pair speeding through space. And it’s a credit to Pratt’s expansive good-naturedness that “Passengers” doesn’t completely torpedo at this moment. The decision - tantamount to murder - is a cosmic mix of creepy, amoral and understandable. (The only comforting thing about this is that apparently journalism is still being practiced in a future where humans can travel at half the speed of light.) Of Jim’s good fortune at having such a mate while lost in space, he simply remarks, “Damn.”Ī suicidal Jim, after wrestling over the decision for months, finally decides to wake up the woman he’s already fallen for, a journalist named Aurora Lane - which sounds like the moniker of either a street or a porn star. Later, the film’s other late-arriving character (Laurence Fishburne) will give voice to the movie’s sexist, sleeping beauty fantasy. Who should be there, locked under glass, but Jennifer Lawrence. He busies himself playing basketball and chatting with a robot bartender, Arthur (a chipper Michael Sheen), who has curiously been programmed to polish glasses and lend a sensitive ear to any customers for the decades-long journey.Īfter a year, Jim’s gaze turns toward the sleeping passengers. He pleads with the ship’s corporate-speak computers. Jim goes through various stages reconciling himself to his fate. The otherwise desolate ship is his coffin. With 90 lonely years to go, he has essentially been roused to his death. Despite his efforts to restart the process, hitting the snooze is out of the question.įor people who find often find themselves unreasonably wide awake in the middle of the night, Jim’s nightmare will have a ring of familiarity. He’s a bear awakened from hibernation too soon. But after a particularly big asteroid dings the ship, Preston’s pod opens 30 years into a 120-year trip. Pratt plays Jim Preston, one of a few thousand people in suspended animation on the Avalon, a spiraling starship hurtling through space on autopilot on its way to a distant colonized planet, Homestead II. Space isn’t just the last frontier it’s the new Western.īut in Morten Tyldum’s “Passengers,” Pratt and Lawrence are handed a faulty flight log. In any case, the stars have never looked so starry.Īnd the movies - “Gravity,” “Interstellar,” “The Martian” - have been among the best blockbusters in recent years. Maybe they’re seeking to colonize new worlds of moviegoers. Perhaps they’re trying to make the best impression possible with alien life forms. George Clooney, Sandra Bullock, Matthew McConaughey, Matt Damon and now Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt have all been rocketed out of the stratosphere. We seem to be shooting our best movie stars into outer space with alarming frequency.
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