My Review of 'Passengers'

Passengers is a story about an interstellar spaceship occupied by 5,000 passengers going from Earth to populate a new planet across the galaxy. The problem is that the ship will need to take something like 100 Earth years to get to the new planet. In order for everyone to get there without dying of old age, they were all frozen and put into a state of deep sleep.

The movie starts off by showing off how high tech this spaceship really is. It can withstand meteor showers and it fixes itself whenever anything happens. This would be a pretty boring story if that was all there was to the story, so something had to happen. To get the plot going, there's a mysterious malfunction on the ship. This malfunction causes one of the sleeping pods to open up 88 years too early. This sleeping pod happens to be for the main character (Chris Pratt).

This is where I got kind of thrown off a little. In all of the trailers that I've seen in the past, I saw Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt on the ship, but Jennifer Lawrence's pod seemed to be okay. I didn't know how Jennifer Lawrence fell into the story. The studio did a good job with the trailer for not giving too much of the story away. This way the audience can still wonder what's going to happen next. I appreciated it even though it wasn't too hard to predict what was going to happen next.

Without giving away too much, Chris Pratt's character is stuck on the spaceship for a very long time. It's a good thing he conveniently had engineering skills prior to boarding the ship—or else he would have died of boredom. I think this part of the movie was pretty interesting. What would you do if you were stuck on an interstellar spaceship with 5,000 people on board, but they're all sleeping? Is there any way for you to get yourself back into the deep sleep? You'd have to do this or else you'll die before you reach the new planet. Do you risk the chance of waking someone else up to help you out? What would you do if you were bored out of your mind in space? There's only so much you can do by yourself without going nuts. Chris Pratt's character also doesn't belong to a high social class so he's only got the privilege to do certain things and eat certain foods. It's almost as if he's in prison. Looking back at the movie now, he actually had some serious power in his hands. He could have done some really messed up things to some of the passengers on board and no one would be there to stop him.

Overall, as a movie it's passable and I enjoyed it. It's particularly good when it's free to watch on TV. I understand why it did so bad in the box office though. I would not want to pay money to see this movie in the theater. The dialogue seemed to be written for a prime time TV show (and I know prime time TV shows are getting really good, but I didn't know how to explain it better than that) and the special effects can, at times, look like they're straight to DVD quality. This was supposed to be a huge blockbuster film, there's no reason for the special effects to be so bad.

I would give this movie a 6.5 out of 10. It's an enjoyable movie that you'll watch on TV when it's airing, but I wouldn't go out of my way to watch it. There's no point in watching it on a big screen with big sound as the special effects aren't quite worthy of watching in high definition and the dialogue is pretty mundane. The concept is very interesting though. They should do something like this again, but execute it a bit better.