Passengers review: Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence float aimlessly in space

Dir. Morten Tyldum, 116 mins, starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Chris Pratt, Michael Sheen, Laurence Fishburne

Passengers is a space travel movie with no clear idea of its destination. Its premise is bleak in the extreme but at the grimmest moments of metaphysical despair here, the filmmakers are still desperately trying to make a glossy romantic drama. At every opportunity, they throw in fetishistic footage of Jennifer Lawrence in her swimsuit or jogging Lycra, looking as if she’s on a galactic version of a Sports Illustrated shoot, or of Chris Pratt in the buff, flexing his muscles and flaunting his backside in the shower.

This is a story of passengers on a 120-year journey across space who wake up from hibernation 90 years too soon. There’s no way to return home. They’re separated from their family and friends. Time will run out on them long before their ship, the Avalon, reaches “Homestead II”, the distant colony where they are due to start a new life. Their fate, it seems, is to fester and die en route.

In spite of its reported $120m budget, Passengers has a smaller cast than that of the average Samuel Beckett play. There are 5,000 passengers on board and 258 crew members but they’re almost all in a very deep sleep. At the beginning of the movie, the only active human on screen is Jim Preston (Pratt), the ruggedly good-looking blue-collar engineer whose hibernation pod malfunctions.

The Avalon may be a spaceship but it bears more than a passing resemblance to one of those sleekly modernist designer hotels in which everything is automated. Jim (like Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic) is travelling economy class. That means he’s not entitled to a top-of-the-range mocha or cappuccino but has to make do with the cheapest coffee for breakfast.

The strongest aspect of Passengers by far is its production design. The spaceship is very lovingly, very intricately, designed. As Jim quickly discovers, it is both a paradise and a hell. The ship has been programmed to anticipate almost every physical need of its passengers. Jim is the only one awake and so has everything to himself. There are diners, bars, viewing platforms and a swimming pool.

Jim even has a Jeeves-like robot barman called Arthur (Michael Sheen) to make him cocktails and to shoot the breeze with him. It’s one of the surprises here that Sheen gives easily the most soulful performance. The barman looks human from the waist upward but has wires and steel cables for legs. Even so, Sheen brings a Tin Man-like pathos to the role. Arthur seems to want to be human and communicates a sense of yearning that we simply don’t get from the two leads.

Jon Spaihts’ screenplay plunders shamelessly from countless other lost in space and survivor stories. Early on, when Jim grows a beard and teeters close to despair, it looks as if he is modelling himself on Robinson Crusoe. The scenes of him alone at the bar rekindle memories of a demented Jack Nicholson drinking highballs in the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. There are obvious parallels, too, with Gravity – not least when the passengers put on their space suits and go on floating walks outside the Avalon.

Jim’s plight is desperate. He is on his own, craving company. He can see all the other passengers in their pods. He regards one, Aurora (Lawrence), as potentially the perfect mate. With his engineering skills, he has the ability to wake her up too. The dilemma for him is that if he does so, he will condemn her to his fate. She will age and die long before the ship reaches Homestead.

Aurora is a journalist and writer in her mid-20s. She has come on the mission because she thinks she will get a decent story from the trip.

Bizarrely, once this sleeping princess is jolted out of her slumber, a dark and ominous film turns briefly into a glorified rom-com. Jim courts Aurora with old-fashioned gallantry, bringing her flowers and using robots as go-betweens when he finally plucks up the courage to ask her out on a date. The spaceship has its very own Michelin-starred restaurant (or equivalent of) where they eat gourmet food and drink fine wines.

Director Tyldum, who did such a fine job in telling the story of neurotic genius Alan Turing in The Imitation Game, seems utterly snookered here. He doesn’t know what to do with his two stars and simply can’t work out how to reconcile the escapist elements with the pessimism at the core of the story. At times, as Jim and Aurora have their lovers’ tiffs and try to avoid each other, we almost forget that we are watching a sci-fi movie at all.

There are elements of kitsch. Lawrence’s Aurora is closer to a cartoon astronaut like Barbarella than she is to characters fighting for their survival in space like Sandra Bullock in Gravity or Sigourney Weaver in Alien. Laurence Fishburne, as Chief Gus Mancuso, the third human rudely awakened from his slumber in the supposedly failsafe pod, looks as if he has just wandered in from an episode of Blake’s 7.

The spaceship is as much a character here as the human protagonists. It is shaped like a pretzel. There are constant shots of it spinning through the cosmos. The malfunctioning of the pods are symptoms of some flaw at the heart of the vessel. There is a sense that it is turning against its human inhabitants.

Several of the special effects-driven sequences are very impressive indeed. There’s a tremendous scene when gravity is lost just as Jennifer Lawrence is swimming – and she and the water both rise upwards in a violent, washing machine on its final rinse-like whirl. Passengers delivers plenty of fairground ride-like spectacle. This, though, doesn’t begin to atone for its evasive and equivocal storyline or for the mood of phoney optimism that always prevails, even at the very grimmest moments.