Talk about a crash landing.
The embargo for âPassengersâ reviews was lifted on Thursday, releasing an avalanche of overwhelmingly negative takes on the Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence star vehicle.
After weeks of a seemingly endless press tour (seriously, if we never see Pratt or Lawrence on a talk show couch again, weâre good), it appears that the sci-fi flick officially does not live up to the hype. In fact, âPassengersâ sounds like a very different film than whatâs being advertised in the inescapable trailers streaming across practically every device in America.
Critics took most issue with a seriously problematic twist that robs Lawrenceâs character of any agency, the filmâs thin plotting and an over-reliance on the charm of its stars to distract from its larger failures.
Read a collection of some of the most brutal reviews below:
âNone of it is very interesting, nor can it get the foul taste out of your mouth about Prattâs unredeemable character. It doesnât help the filmâs whole female-victimization vibe either that Lawrence is relegated to being a pretty helpless damsel in distress when the Avalonâs systems start to fail. Sheâs way too good of an actress to be told to look scared and shout lines like âWhat does that mean?!â when technical terms are thrown around, and âJim, how do we fix this?!âwhile Pratt tries to win her back with his can-do heroism. Sheâs stuck in what essentially amounts to a risable two-hour exhibit of sci-fi Stockholm Syndrome.â
âTyldun handles the dialogue almost as if he were doing a stage play, but he turns out to be a blah director of spectacle; he doesnât make it dramatic. (He does create one cool image, though, of a swimming pool freed from gravity.) There isnât much to âPassengersâ besides its one thin situation, and there are moments when the film could almost be âa very special episode of âStar Trek,ââ because Pratt, with his golden-boy smirk, has a Kirkian side, and the voyage theyâre on is grandiose yet amorphous (like the Enterpriseâs). The ship itself has a variety of chambers and communal spaces, but it all seems overly familiar and sterile. Whatâs lackluster about âPassengersâ isnât just that the movie is short on surprise, but that itâs like a castaway love story set in the worldâs largest, emptiest shopping mall in space.â
IGN:
âOnly actors as immediately likable and emotionally dynamic as Pratt and Lawrence would be able to pull off a film that requires this much heavy lifting, and their easy chemistry makes up for many of Passengersâ misses. Pratt in particular has to fill a lot of the film by himself, and he makes a convincing case for Jim as he makes his tough choice and then deals with the fallout of it.â
âPassengersâ is also part of a good trend â a sci-fi movie about being smart. Like âArrival,â âThe Martianâ and âInterstellar, itâs a story that sets up a problem â and then gets its drama out of people solving it. There isnât a murderous alien or raygun in the whole thing. But then thereâs the movieâs own problem â the ugliness of that early, ill-advised twist. That sets things off on a bad course â and although the movie doesnât immediately crash and burn, it never, ever recovers. It loses some of its warmth, and most of its charm. And it ends up as nearly as cold and creepy as the space it takes us through.â
âThere is, at first, a thrilling what-if in Jon Spaihtsâ screenplay, which concocts a sort of Titanic in outer space, with dollops of Sleeping Beauty and âGravityâ thrown into the high-concept mix. Under less shiny, by-the-numbers direction, the story might have soared, or at least been more stirring. Yet while Passengers offers a few shrewd observations about our increasingly tech-enabled, corporatized lives, its heavy-handed mix of life-or-death exigencies and feel-good bromides finally feels like a case of more being less.â
âIt doesnât help that Tyldum frequently shoots Lawrence with an almost fetishistic interest in her curves, to the point that even after the catâs out of the bag â and Lawrence nails Auroraâs initial distress and rage â he cuts from her screaming âYou took my life!â to an ogling shot of her swimming in a two-piece. And she swims a lot.â
âPassengersâ refuses to really wrestle with the compelling questions at its core, instead opting to lean on Lawrence and Prattâs collective charm to keep things ticking amiably along. The problem is, this isnât an amiable story â itâs a philosophically thorny one, and aiming to keep things light doesnât dilute any of its issues, it just dumbs the entire outing down. âTitanicâ in space? No, but itâs certainly a disaster.â