It is fairly apparent that there are very few people left in Hollywood who are really willing to take a risk. Even with the stunning, gob smacking really, beauty of Passengers’s special effects, the crux of the story is so unstable and so unfortunately mundane for a film that takes place on a starship that the viewer is left feeling slightly bewildered, as if a romantic dramedy somehow genre warped into a really banal Star Trek sequel.
Starring two very versatile actors, Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence, the film follows the deeply disturbing premise regarding the loneliness of space travel. Pratt plays Jim Preston, a mechanical engineer (a very conveniently plotted aspect that manifests in almost ever action point in the script) who is traveling on the Avalon - a starship that is carrying 5,000 passengers on an intergalactic immigration trip to Homestead II, a planet that offers new opportunities outside of an over crowded Earth, but requires a 120 year trip that must undertaken in a hibernation pod.
When Jim is very rudely awakened from his cryogenic sleep he finds himself the sole person conscious. Supposed to wake up four months before arrival along with all the other immigrants, in the slow, bleary moments after cryo-sleep, Jim begins to realise that something is terribly wrong. After some awkward grappling with the ubiquitous Artificial Intelligence, or A.I., that runs the enormous state-of-the-art ship, Jim realises, to his horror, that he has awakened 90 years before Avalon will reach Homestead II.