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Review: Poignant 'Passengers' not your typical sci-fi film
Sci-fi films often involve space combat or extraterrestrial beings. Passengers, however, aims for something different.
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Despite being encased in a highly modern environment, "Passengers" focuses mainly on the subject of human nature. (Sony Pictures/File)
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ci-fi films often involve space combat or extraterrestrial beings. Passengers, however, aims for something different. Passengers was directed by Morten Tyldum (Headhunters, The Imitation Game) and written by Jon Spaihts (The Darkest Hour and Doctor Strange).
The movie opens with an outer space journey, in which Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) is on his way to a colony planet named Homeland II, along with 5,000 passengers and crew members in a commercial spaceship. The planet-to-planet travel is supposed to take 120 years to complete and the passengers are supposed to be awoken at a certain period nearing the spaceship’s landing. However, Preston’s hibernation pod malfunctions and he got awoken way before the designated time. He then got stranded in the spacecraft; initially alone until Aurora Lane (Jennifer Lawrence) joins him.
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Despite being encased in a highly modern environment, the film focuses on the subject of human nature, offers a mixture of sci-fi, romance and psychology with a touch of humor here and there.
“I am a huge sci-fi fan; I have such respect for the genre, so I wanted to try to do something that had never been done before,” Tyldum commented in an official statement.
Throughout the film, which appears as if it was made in three phases, viewers get to see the emotional shifts, primal instincts and decisions made by characters. Audiences may differ in agreeing with choices made in the film, but the plot has the potential to engage audiences into thinking about what they would do if they were in similar situations. (kes)
