Plot points from Passengers are discussed in this review.
Passengers is silly but fun, a romcom in space that stars the most naturally appealing couple on the big screen in years and features just the right mix of comedy and action to keep date-night couples glued to the screen—a Titanic in the Milky Way, maybe.
Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) wakes up 30 years into a 90-year voyage to Homestead II, a colony on a distant moon, after the ship he's on endures an asteroid strike that brings him out of hibernation far too early. He spends his time getting to know the lay of the land—checking out the ship's movie library, playing hoops by himself, chatting up the ship's robot bartender Arthur (Michael Sheen), and trying to figure out a way to gain access to the crew quarters to find someone who can figure out how to get him back to sleep.
He lives this way for about a year, slowly going insane from boredom. And then, after nearly committing suicide by blowing himself out of an airlock and into the emptiness of space, Jim finds salvation in the form of Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence). He starts stalking her while she's in hyper-sleep, checking out her passenger profile (she's a writer looking for life experiences in order to finally find a story worth telling) and hovering over her hibernation pod. He's agonizing over whether or not to wake her up—to condemn her to die on this lonely Coke can hurtling through space—and then, well, does so. He just can't take it anymore.
And luckily he did! The ship is breaking down and he'll need her help to save it, them, and every other one of the 5,200-or-so souls on board.
Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence are perfect, practically dripping with charisma. It's not particularly difficult to believe that these two ridiculously attractive, intensely engaging people would want to be together, even if she has to throw a bit of a fit in order to keep the plot moving and introduce some emotional tension into the proceedings.
If you spend too much time thinking about basic details of the plot, you'll find a lot of nits to pick. For instance: A great deal is made of the fact that Jim can only get basic coffee and basic breakfast from the mess hall because he's the equivalent of a steerage-class customer. As he explains to the would-be journalist Aurora, he received a discounted ticket because they need engineers on the colony they're traveling to. But then we see him drinking all the single malt he can handle and dining in the ship's fancy French and Japanese restaurants. Is there a rigid class system on the Avalon, or nah?
In the end, it doesn't really matter. Vague gestures at class conflict aside, the lesson of Passengers, insofar as there is one, is that Jim was totally right to wake up the hottest woman he could find on the ship and get her to hang out with him. Not only does this save the day, she falls in love with him and forgets all about her silly little narcissistic rich girl dreams in order to spend her life with a real man. Passengers is the sort of movie that a lot of people will write a great number of think pieces about whilst tossing around words like "privilege" and "the male gaze" and maybe even a "Magical Negro" or two if they're feeling particularly saucy and don't mind stretching the term a bit to fit their thesis.
In the end, though, it's really just a love story with a smattering of action and some solid chuckles. That a star-driven, big-budget, high-concept, politically retrograde movie like this can get made in the current environment suggests to me that we can still make the cinema great again. And who doesn't want to do that?