【Dear Utol (2025): Week 8 Highlights Episode 45】

"There's a reason we woke up early,Dear Utol (2025): Week 8 Highlights Episode 45" Chris Pratt ominously declares in the Passengers trailer after he and Jennifer Lawrence wake up from their hibernation during a space mission.

Sound intriguing? Unfortunately, you won't find out the answer, at least not to any satisfying degree, and Passengers, purported to be a sprawling space conspiracy, ends up being just a truly tepid rom-com.

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Starring Lawrence, Pratt and sometimes Chris Pratt's butt, Passengers wastes little time on exposition and instead opens with the starship Avalon, an impressive space craft taking 5,000 humans to the planet Homestead II. It takes 120 years to arrive at Homestead II, so passengers enter hibernation pods that will wake them up four months before arrival. Due to some unknown glitch Jim Preston (Pratt) wakes up 90 years too soon.

Jim is as cool under pressure as he can be in this situation, having realized his best-case scenario is he lives out his life alone in space with no company except a bartending cyborg (the ever-magnetic Michael Sheen). Pratt infuses humor to the gravity of Jim's situation but sadly Jim doesn't have the determination and charisma of, say, Mark Watney.

Jim's predicament could be compelling as a movie premise, fraught with seemingly insurmountable peril; He's alone, he's ill-equipped, he can't access much of the ship and he's the first evidence in history of a failed hibernation pod. But after some depression, he turns to alcoholism and instead of exploring the complexity of all his feelings the film...opts to give him a girlfriend.

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That's right: In his darkest hour, Jim spots a sleeping beauty named Aurora(Lawrence), and because he's drunk, hopeless and mad with isolation, he decides he's in love with the first cute white girl he sees. He pulls up her passenger profile and falls for all her totally uniquequirks she acquired from Hollywood's rom-com playbook: She's a writer, she's from New York and she loves coffee and the Chrysler Building! Gag.

At that point, I lost all sympathy for Jim, despite Pratt's many charms, because he decides to wake Aurora up as a balm for his solitude. It's an utterly selfish and creepy act. He didn't wake up anyone who he didn't want to have loads of space sex with and it crosses the line from loneliness to entitlement (incidentally, space sex looks a lot like Earth sex).

Later on, we learn from video footage that all Aurora's friends wanted for this successful writer embarking on a historic journey through space and time was for her to just find someone to share it with. No wonder she left them behind.

Lawrence, for all her talents, is little more than a prop, a character written to give Jim someone to play off of and later use as an assistant to help fix the ship's myriad mechanical failures. It's unclear what would compel Lawrence to take this role; she's an Oscar winner, a former franchise lead and David O. Russell's muse -- she deserves better than to be regulated to A Girlfriend. For his part, Pratt doesn't get to flex the comedic muscles that made him so winsome in Guardians of the Galaxy;instead he flexes real muscles and spends a shockingly high fraction of the film playing Dance Dance Revolution.

Also tragically underutilized is Laurence Fishburne, who appears briefly two acts into the movie, not to mention the sporadic appearance of Sheen as Arthur the bartending android, in what seemed like such an obvious allusion to The Shining that I took the unacknowledged reference as a personal insult.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Visually there can be no complaints but Passengers barely does or even tries to do anything we haven't seen before in this genre. The most stunning scene is of Lawrence suspended in a mass of water because the artificial gravity failed while she was in a swimming pool. I would watch two hours of just that -- in fact, I wish I had rather than watch Pratt and Lawrence's Stockholm Syndrome love plot.

The trailers have Pratt saying "Something's wrong, something big," but rather than the ship issues he's discussing, the real "something wrong" in Passengersis that the stakes never feel real and the plot isn't compelling. The film masquerades as a thriller but succumbs to a sloppily written genre-mash which at no point feels particularly pressing despite the literal life or death stakes. For the first time, space is...kind of boring and Lawrence and Pratt are too.

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