Passengers is Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt in space. That alone should guarantee a worthwhile film. However, critics are finding very little positives in the Morten Tyldum directed pic. Here are a few reviews from leading outlets.
"There’s only one place for “Passengers” to go, and once it gets there, Jon Spaihts’s script runs out of gas. Tyldun handles the dialogue almost as if he were doing a stage play, but he turns out to be a blah director of spectacle; he doesn’t make it dramatic. There’s not much to “Passengers” besides its one thin situation, and there are moments when the film could almost be “a very special episode of ‘Star Trek,'” because Pratt, with his golden-boy smirk, has a Kirkian side, and the voyage they’re on is grandiose yet amorphous (like the Enterprise’s). 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."
---Variety
"The film is a character drama, one about the need for companionship and the value of living in the present, that just happens to be a big-budget science-fiction adventure. I wish it were more confrontational regarding individual choices made by certain characters, as the third act conflicts serve as a distraction from and a de-facto absolution of the more pressing emotional/psychological issues at play. Despite top billing, Lawrence is the love interest, one who eventually stands on the sidelines as the dude gets to save the day. For better or worse, this is Chris Pratt’s star vehicle."
---Forbes
"Though its conclusion falls short of completely satisfying, Passengers' impeccably cast leads make the film well worth the journey. It's a sci-fi story worth the time of fans of the genre, even if its focus is less on the world its creating and more on the impossible situations it places its characters in. Passengers explores the idea of the journey being more important than the destination, and the same can be said of the experience of viewing the film itself."
---IGN scores it 7.3/10
"Even if its narrative was just as preposterous as Passengers’, Gravity showed how it was possible to suggest genuine physical jeopardy in a spacebound setting. 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 Dunn’s emergence from the water, hair slightly ruffled, ever in doubt."
--- The Guardian
" Passengers is not very good. In fact, it’s pretty bad. The studio is positioning this new Chris Pratt-Jennifer Lawrence sci-fi flick as a sort of Adam-and-Eve riff on The Martian. Two passengers on a space ship headed to a distant colony called Homestead II are woken up 90 years before they should be. Something with their hibernation pods goes wrong and now they’re stranded together and alone. They have to figure out a way to survive – and if sparks fly while they’re hurtling through space, well, all the better. That’s the way the trailer makes it seem, at least. And I’ll be honest, that’s a movie I’d kind of want to see. But that’s not what we get. Not even close.
---Entertainment Weekly gives it a D+
"A morally dubious set-up to this glittering starship romance makes for queasy viewing and empty action thrills."
---The Wrap
"It isn’t that Passengers is treading in delicate territory that ultimately undermines its premise—on the contrary—but the fact that it doesn’t trust its central big thinker to keep its movie afloat from beginning to end."
---Nerdist gives the film 2.5 out of 5
"Dazzling design and star power don’t quite keep this starship afloat. 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. It’s enough to make you wonder if the work that Aurora longs to write has been a self-help book all along."
---The Hollywood Reporter
As you can see the general consensus appears to be that Passengers isn't an effective hybrid as there wasn't a strong enough committment to the sci-fi or the romance. With reviews bombing, Sony will be relying on star power alone to churn a profit on the $120 million holiday blockbuster. With it going up against Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and
an Assassin's Creed film that appears to be gaining steam, the odds are not in their favor.
Passengers currently has a
Metacritic score of 39 out of 100. It opens in North America on December 21. It's rated PG-13 and has a run time of 1 hr and 56 minutes.
Two passengers (Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence) aboard a spacecraft traveling to a distant planet are brought out of suspended animation by a technical glitch -- 90 years before the vessel is due to reach its destination. Together, they must investigate the malfunction that awakened them, which could threaten the safety of the ship. Michael Sheen and Laurence Fishburne co-star. Directed by Morten Tyldum (The Imitation Game)