passengersStarring Chris Pratt, Jennifer Lawrence

Directed by Morten Tyldum

What happens if you’re woken too early from suspended animation?

The most damning praise to offer Morten Tyldum’s sci-fi adventure romance is that it’s fine. Just fine. Not bad. Not special, just lacking in ambition, and the extent to which you enjoy it will depend on how enamoured you are with the star pairing of Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt.

Essentially a sci-fi film for people who wouldn’t ordinarily see a sci-fi film, this is a survival tale that could actually be set on a desert island or an abandoned ship, such is the minor reliance on the setting. We’re at an unspecific point in the future when Earth has become overcrowded and off-world colonies are being set up on the far reaches of the galaxy. The only downside is that it takes 120 years to get there, meaning that you’ll never see your friends and family again, but that’s ok because you’ll be in suspended animation in a cluster of sleep pods pinched from the Aliens film set. Oh, and nothing could possibly go wrong with the journey. Nothing could go wrong in the same way that the Titanic was unsinkable, meaning that Chris Pratt wakes up to find he’s been revived 90 years too early with no prospect of going back to sleep.

I’m not going to reveal any more plot, suffice to say that he’s later joined by co-passenger Jennifer Lawrence and the ship starts to present moments of peril for our leads as they come to terms with the prospect of living the rest of their lives together (or not). As I’ve already inferred, the sci-fi trappings are purely there to add some jeopardy, and while the effects ate top notch, the whole design is very derivative and obvious, opting for the sterile and bright future rather than any dystopic ‘lived-in’ grime.

The action scenes are well-mounted – a swimming pool bubble in an anti-gravity situation and a tethered spacewalk being the highlights – but if you’ve seen Gravity and Interstellar you’ll find nothing new. Oh, and there’s some cute cleaner robots and a food replicator. Get the picture?

It seems mean to move on to the dodgy science and medicine, but again we’re in the territory where the vacuum of space seems nothing more than an inconvenience to the human body and all you have to do to resolve some pretty fatal system problems is hold a door open and flick a few switches. The biggest cheat actually happens in the trailer where it’s suggested that there’s a grand mystery around why this has all happened. Hmmm.

Verdict: Strangely naïve for a 21st Century movie, this feels like a throwback to a time when any old nonsense could be trotted out provided the leads were big enough and enough of a distraction to divert you away from the flimsy half-baked story. This is sci-fi 101 and its plot would have struggled to stretch to the running time of one of the half-hour Twilight Zones. Lawrence and Pratt make a beautiful couple and I have no doubt that the movie will find its generic audience – it’s just a shame that you’ve seen all the best bits in the trailer… and across countless other genre movies of the last 40 years. 5/10

Nick Joy