Ai yi yi yi yi. Just saw a screening of this thing. This is yet another time where you really wish that whoever it was that cut the trailer had actually written and directed the movie because that movie -- I mean the movie that you thought they'd made when you watched the trailer -- that movie really looked good.
Too bad that wasn't the movie I ended up seeing when I actually saw Passengers.
That movie, alas, was an utterly misbegotten disaster.
Okay, let's be fair. One man's opinion. In my opinion -- Passengers was an utterly misbegotten disaster.
So -- for those of you who are interested in my humble opinion, it follows, complete with spoilers.
Okay, start off with a really cool giant space ship. This isn't one of those faster than light universes, so it take a century plus to get fully automated ships full of hibernating passengers and crews across the deeps of space.
This has been going on for some time so there are already functioning colonies in various places. This is a going concern. When a ship gets close to a colony, around four months out, everybody is woken up. The crew takes over, the 5000 colonists go through a briefing, orientation phase, then they're landed and take up their places on the already thriving colony world.
That's how it's supposed to work.
So we're in deep space with this cool-looking space ship travelling close to light speed with this sort of force field thing at the front and -- guess what?
We run right into a meteor shower or one of those Empire Strikes Back style asteroid belts where the asteroids are all around twenty yards away from one another (you know, the kind that don't actually exist anywhere, never mind in deep space) and the ship's deflector shield is sort of overwhelmed and the ship is damaged.
The only immediate result of this is that one of the hibernation pods in the passenger section -- repeat ONLY ONE -- deactivates and Chris Pratt wakes up.
Okay, what follows is actually a pretty good section of the film. Because of the damage, the ship doesn't quite know what's happened. And Chris Pratt, at first, also doesn't realize that he's the only one that's woken up. And when he does, because he's sort low down on the totem pole as passengers go, the ship won't tell him anything. That makes perfect sense. The automated aspects of the ship are designed to keep passengers away from anything that they shouldn't be messing with. So he can't access the crew quarters, where all the crew members are still in hibernation. He can get access to the bridge, to any computer systems that relate to controlling the ship or to ship systems. The automated systems simply relate to him according to their very limited protocols. They let him into the quarters and entertainment facilities that have been assigned to him, give him the super low grade food that he's entitled to -- and that's about it.
And he's a technician second grade -- basically a mechanic, so his skills are limited. He can't get the hibernation pod to refreeze him. He can't get into the crew quarters. He can't do anything. And there are ninety years to go before the ship reaches its destination.
So other than hanging out with the "Shining-style" robot bartender, he is just plain f-cked.
Now, here is where Passengers runs straight into a freaking supernova. No, I don't mean literally, because that would have been interesting. I mean story-wise.
Okay. A year goes. Yes. An entire year, and Chris Pratt demonstrates how low he's gotten by growing a beard (always a bad sign). Finally, his beard gets so long that he decides to commit suicide. He climbs into the "have fun by floating outside the space ship" suit, goes outside the ship and looks around.
Yes, it would have been really easy to just cut himself loose at this point, but -- you know, reasons. Instead, he comes back inside, closes the air lock, and then he's about to blast himself into space -- and. No! he can't do it. He crawls back inside and there, in front of him, is a hibernation pod and in the pod is --
That's right. Jennifer Lawrence. And lets face it, no matter how long you've let your beard go, who can blow himself into outer space when you've got Jennifer Lawrence lying there in a hibernation pod looking all, you know -- Jennifer Lawrence-y.
So now he's torn. Yeah, that's right. This is how this movie is playing out. Is Chris Pratt. Super nice guy. Nice guy of the freaking universe, going to wake Jennifer Lawrence up out of hibernation so that he can have a f-ck buddy for the next ninety years -- or at any rate for however long she's presentable.
Oh, but no. It's not that. He truly loves her -- you can tell it's true love because he spends days pining over her video profile. Yeah, "pining" I think is the word they use for it in the future.
Finally, his (ahem) love grows so great that he can't help but completely exploit this girl and use her for his own totally selfish ends. So, telling the robot bartender not to tell Jennifer under any circumstances that he's responsible for waking her up because, you know, that's just about the worst thing a human being could possibly do to another and if she found out she'd hate his guts forever, so keep it on down low -- you know?
Then -- he does it. He wakes her up. He pretends not to know. She's sad. Can't anything be done? No.
Okay. Guess what happens next? Maybe something having to do with that meteor storm that hit the ship around a year before? Nah.
Something having to do with Chris Pratt feeling like a complete piece of **** for having done this and that interferes with -- Nah.
No. For the next year -- YES, YOU HEARD ME. Okay, actually, you're just reading this. YES, YOU JUST READ ME. For the next year, Chris Pratt proceeds to court Jennifer Lawrence and win her over with his Chris Pratt-y charm and she proceeds to fall in love with him.
She swims. They date. She buys him food with her First Class Passenger wrist band. They watch the ship zip past a sun and it's like really cool and beautiful and has nothing to do with the story. He makes her an engagement ring with his mechanical skill and he's going to propose and then --
Okay, well, we know what's going to happen next but certainly there's got to be some really clever way that she's going to find --
Nah. The robot bartender just tells her. Period. No reason. That smarmy British robot bitch could just as easily have told her a year ago and saved us all a great big chunk of this movie but no. Story God decided to just reach down into this great swirly of a movie and make him tell her now, for maximum dramatic (and we use the term loosely here) effect.
What obviously should happen and does -- Jennifer Lawrence is like super upset and tells Chris Pratt to throw himself out the nearest air lock.
What obviously should happen and doesn't -- Chris Pratt takes a freaking sledge hammer and smashes the f-ck out of that g-dam big-mouthed robot bartender.
So -- guess that put a little bug in Chris Pratt's little love plan, eh? I wonder what's going to happen next?
Well, he goes into the giant storage locker that holds thousands of tons of whatever the hell you could possibly want and he defrosts -- ? Well, what do you think. A tree. That's because Jennifer Lawrence sort of likes trees.
And he cuts a hole in the middle of the big dining area place and he plants the tree there because -- hey, if you'd intended to travel to a new world and some stranger thawed you out ninety years too soon in order to trick you into becoming his love toy -- surely having having a tree planted in the middle of a big dining room would make it all okay. Right?
Unfortunately, this question remains forever unanswered because guess who shows up right at this juncture. It's gruff crew member Laurence Fishburne.
One might almost think, at this point, that both Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence would be rendered completely irrelevant, now that somebody who knows what the hell to do has finally shown up -- well, you'd be right, except -- reasons!
It appears that the defrosting procedure, which worked perfectly fine with the two attractive stars seems to have malfunctioned with the less attractive supporting actor and even as the ship's systems are rapidly failing -- ditto with Laurence Fishburne's systems, despite what the newly introduced med bay and it's super-duper auto-doc is able to do, which is pretty much nothing when it comes to supporting characters.
Fortunately (for the audience and our rapidly diminishing supply of patience with this movie) after two years of pretty much nothing but soap opera bullshit between these two, the advent of Laurence Fishburne means that some heavy duty nasty disaster-type stuff is rapidly heading our way.
So, at least we get to see that really cool scene from the trailer where the gravity fails and Jennifer Lawrence gets trapped in that giant bubble of swimming pool water. Because, no doubt, this would be a perfect opportunity, given that she and Chris Pratt are still totally on the outs because of Chris Pratt being an A #1 **** heel for having woken her up in order to get himself a mail-order un-freeze-dried girl friend, for Chris Pratt to make his way through the zero G space ship and save her from drowning from the giant swimming pool bubble and thus begin to heal their relationship. Right? Am I right?
Nah. Chris Pratt floats around and saves himself on his own in his part of the ship. The sick Laurence Fishburne just sort of floats around in his cabin. And Jennifer Lawrence sort of drowns -- and I mean we actually kind of see her drown inside the giant water bubble without anyone saving her.
And then the gravity comes back on and she and the water drop back down into the pool -- and, I imagine you didn't know this, but if you've actually drowned and stopped breathing, being dropped into a swimming pool, even if still completely submerged, the force of that impact will cause you to wake up, and come up out the water and be fine again. Because that's what happens.
And none of this effects any of their relationships or really even the story at all. It just happens.
So, end of story. They get to the core. A meteor has damaged it. Fishburne's dying. Pratt's got to go into the core. They've got to lower the temperature by opening the airlock. Huh? What? At this point, I sincerely didn't give a ****. But he does, he's blown into space. His tether comes lose. She goes after him. Oh gosh, He's not breathing! It turns out his dead. The end.
No, not really. She takes him to the autodoc, which she can now use because Fishburne gave her his crew wrist band thing before he died (oh, did I mention that Laurence Fishburne died? He died.) And now, because Chris Pratt, unlike Laurence Fishburne is a star, it promptly brings it right back to life and he's fine.
But wait! There's more! Because now, even though we've established over and over that once you've been brought out of hibernation, you can't be put back in because putting you in is like a really complicated process and it takes -- nah. It turns out that the auto-doc can actually put someone into hibernation or anyway, something that's just like it.
But no! It can only work for one person. And that person must be --
You see? This way Chris Pratt gets to not be a compete piece of crap by means of a story device that is simply dropped in out of interdimensional ****-space.
Oh, let's just check the operating system on this autodoc. Oh, right here. It's the Deus ex Machina mark 2.1.
Oh, but wait. Is Jennifer Lawrence really going to leave the noble (really, is he?) Chris Pratt alone on this ship for the next 88 years. Well, not that he's really going to live that long. Besides, once she's asleep he'll probably just find some other chick to wake up.
However will this Hollywood-style moral dilemma be resolved?
Well, flash forward 88 years as the rest of the passengers finally wake up and what do they see? It turns out that Chris has continued his truly reckless gardening in the central plaza in order to please Jennifer's need for greenery -- and now it's spread to the point where the whole area resembles a vast forest. This is, I imagine, supposed to make us happy at the "world" that Chris and Jennifer made for themselves.
Personally, in watching this, I could only think of two things.
One, I could only imagine the unimaginable damage that uncontrolled plant like and root systems can cause when it starts to work its way through electronic and mechanical systems.
Second, I couldn't help but picture the generations of inbred Chris/Jen mutants that would begin to crawl out from under the roots and start to feast on the helpless Passengers - this would no doubt be the subject of the Sequel, Passengers 2 -- The Devouring.
To Be Continued ---
Too bad that wasn't the movie I ended up seeing when I actually saw Passengers.
That movie, alas, was an utterly misbegotten disaster.
Okay, let's be fair. One man's opinion. In my opinion -- Passengers was an utterly misbegotten disaster.
So -- for those of you who are interested in my humble opinion, it follows, complete with spoilers.
Okay, start off with a really cool giant space ship. This isn't one of those faster than light universes, so it take a century plus to get fully automated ships full of hibernating passengers and crews across the deeps of space.
This has been going on for some time so there are already functioning colonies in various places. This is a going concern. When a ship gets close to a colony, around four months out, everybody is woken up. The crew takes over, the 5000 colonists go through a briefing, orientation phase, then they're landed and take up their places on the already thriving colony world.
That's how it's supposed to work.
So we're in deep space with this cool-looking space ship travelling close to light speed with this sort of force field thing at the front and -- guess what?
We run right into a meteor shower or one of those Empire Strikes Back style asteroid belts where the asteroids are all around twenty yards away from one another (you know, the kind that don't actually exist anywhere, never mind in deep space) and the ship's deflector shield is sort of overwhelmed and the ship is damaged.
The only immediate result of this is that one of the hibernation pods in the passenger section -- repeat ONLY ONE -- deactivates and Chris Pratt wakes up.
Okay, what follows is actually a pretty good section of the film. Because of the damage, the ship doesn't quite know what's happened. And Chris Pratt, at first, also doesn't realize that he's the only one that's woken up. And when he does, because he's sort low down on the totem pole as passengers go, the ship won't tell him anything. That makes perfect sense. The automated aspects of the ship are designed to keep passengers away from anything that they shouldn't be messing with. So he can't access the crew quarters, where all the crew members are still in hibernation. He can get access to the bridge, to any computer systems that relate to controlling the ship or to ship systems. The automated systems simply relate to him according to their very limited protocols. They let him into the quarters and entertainment facilities that have been assigned to him, give him the super low grade food that he's entitled to -- and that's about it.
And he's a technician second grade -- basically a mechanic, so his skills are limited. He can't get the hibernation pod to refreeze him. He can't get into the crew quarters. He can't do anything. And there are ninety years to go before the ship reaches its destination.
So other than hanging out with the "Shining-style" robot bartender, he is just plain f-cked.
Now, here is where Passengers runs straight into a freaking supernova. No, I don't mean literally, because that would have been interesting. I mean story-wise.
Okay. A year goes. Yes. An entire year, and Chris Pratt demonstrates how low he's gotten by growing a beard (always a bad sign). Finally, his beard gets so long that he decides to commit suicide. He climbs into the "have fun by floating outside the space ship" suit, goes outside the ship and looks around.
Yes, it would have been really easy to just cut himself loose at this point, but -- you know, reasons. Instead, he comes back inside, closes the air lock, and then he's about to blast himself into space -- and. No! he can't do it. He crawls back inside and there, in front of him, is a hibernation pod and in the pod is --
That's right. Jennifer Lawrence. And lets face it, no matter how long you've let your beard go, who can blow himself into outer space when you've got Jennifer Lawrence lying there in a hibernation pod looking all, you know -- Jennifer Lawrence-y.
So now he's torn. Yeah, that's right. This is how this movie is playing out. Is Chris Pratt. Super nice guy. Nice guy of the freaking universe, going to wake Jennifer Lawrence up out of hibernation so that he can have a f-ck buddy for the next ninety years -- or at any rate for however long she's presentable.
Oh, but no. It's not that. He truly loves her -- you can tell it's true love because he spends days pining over her video profile. Yeah, "pining" I think is the word they use for it in the future.
Finally, his (ahem) love grows so great that he can't help but completely exploit this girl and use her for his own totally selfish ends. So, telling the robot bartender not to tell Jennifer under any circumstances that he's responsible for waking her up because, you know, that's just about the worst thing a human being could possibly do to another and if she found out she'd hate his guts forever, so keep it on down low -- you know?
Then -- he does it. He wakes her up. He pretends not to know. She's sad. Can't anything be done? No.
Okay. Guess what happens next? Maybe something having to do with that meteor storm that hit the ship around a year before? Nah.
Something having to do with Chris Pratt feeling like a complete piece of **** for having done this and that interferes with -- Nah.
No. For the next year -- YES, YOU HEARD ME. Okay, actually, you're just reading this. YES, YOU JUST READ ME. For the next year, Chris Pratt proceeds to court Jennifer Lawrence and win her over with his Chris Pratt-y charm and she proceeds to fall in love with him.
She swims. They date. She buys him food with her First Class Passenger wrist band. They watch the ship zip past a sun and it's like really cool and beautiful and has nothing to do with the story. He makes her an engagement ring with his mechanical skill and he's going to propose and then --
Okay, well, we know what's going to happen next but certainly there's got to be some really clever way that she's going to find --
Nah. The robot bartender just tells her. Period. No reason. That smarmy British robot bitch could just as easily have told her a year ago and saved us all a great big chunk of this movie but no. Story God decided to just reach down into this great swirly of a movie and make him tell her now, for maximum dramatic (and we use the term loosely here) effect.
What obviously should happen and does -- Jennifer Lawrence is like super upset and tells Chris Pratt to throw himself out the nearest air lock.
What obviously should happen and doesn't -- Chris Pratt takes a freaking sledge hammer and smashes the f-ck out of that g-dam big-mouthed robot bartender.
So -- guess that put a little bug in Chris Pratt's little love plan, eh? I wonder what's going to happen next?
Well, he goes into the giant storage locker that holds thousands of tons of whatever the hell you could possibly want and he defrosts -- ? Well, what do you think. A tree. That's because Jennifer Lawrence sort of likes trees.
And he cuts a hole in the middle of the big dining area place and he plants the tree there because -- hey, if you'd intended to travel to a new world and some stranger thawed you out ninety years too soon in order to trick you into becoming his love toy -- surely having having a tree planted in the middle of a big dining room would make it all okay. Right?
Unfortunately, this question remains forever unanswered because guess who shows up right at this juncture. It's gruff crew member Laurence Fishburne.
One might almost think, at this point, that both Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence would be rendered completely irrelevant, now that somebody who knows what the hell to do has finally shown up -- well, you'd be right, except -- reasons!
It appears that the defrosting procedure, which worked perfectly fine with the two attractive stars seems to have malfunctioned with the less attractive supporting actor and even as the ship's systems are rapidly failing -- ditto with Laurence Fishburne's systems, despite what the newly introduced med bay and it's super-duper auto-doc is able to do, which is pretty much nothing when it comes to supporting characters.
Fortunately (for the audience and our rapidly diminishing supply of patience with this movie) after two years of pretty much nothing but soap opera bullshit between these two, the advent of Laurence Fishburne means that some heavy duty nasty disaster-type stuff is rapidly heading our way.
So, at least we get to see that really cool scene from the trailer where the gravity fails and Jennifer Lawrence gets trapped in that giant bubble of swimming pool water. Because, no doubt, this would be a perfect opportunity, given that she and Chris Pratt are still totally on the outs because of Chris Pratt being an A #1 **** heel for having woken her up in order to get himself a mail-order un-freeze-dried girl friend, for Chris Pratt to make his way through the zero G space ship and save her from drowning from the giant swimming pool bubble and thus begin to heal their relationship. Right? Am I right?
Nah. Chris Pratt floats around and saves himself on his own in his part of the ship. The sick Laurence Fishburne just sort of floats around in his cabin. And Jennifer Lawrence sort of drowns -- and I mean we actually kind of see her drown inside the giant water bubble without anyone saving her.
And then the gravity comes back on and she and the water drop back down into the pool -- and, I imagine you didn't know this, but if you've actually drowned and stopped breathing, being dropped into a swimming pool, even if still completely submerged, the force of that impact will cause you to wake up, and come up out the water and be fine again. Because that's what happens.
And none of this effects any of their relationships or really even the story at all. It just happens.
So, end of story. They get to the core. A meteor has damaged it. Fishburne's dying. Pratt's got to go into the core. They've got to lower the temperature by opening the airlock. Huh? What? At this point, I sincerely didn't give a ****. But he does, he's blown into space. His tether comes lose. She goes after him. Oh gosh, He's not breathing! It turns out his dead. The end.
No, not really. She takes him to the autodoc, which she can now use because Fishburne gave her his crew wrist band thing before he died (oh, did I mention that Laurence Fishburne died? He died.) And now, because Chris Pratt, unlike Laurence Fishburne is a star, it promptly brings it right back to life and he's fine.
But wait! There's more! Because now, even though we've established over and over that once you've been brought out of hibernation, you can't be put back in because putting you in is like a really complicated process and it takes -- nah. It turns out that the auto-doc can actually put someone into hibernation or anyway, something that's just like it.
But no! It can only work for one person. And that person must be --
You see? This way Chris Pratt gets to not be a compete piece of crap by means of a story device that is simply dropped in out of interdimensional ****-space.
Oh, let's just check the operating system on this autodoc. Oh, right here. It's the Deus ex Machina mark 2.1.
Oh, but wait. Is Jennifer Lawrence really going to leave the noble (really, is he?) Chris Pratt alone on this ship for the next 88 years. Well, not that he's really going to live that long. Besides, once she's asleep he'll probably just find some other chick to wake up.
However will this Hollywood-style moral dilemma be resolved?
Well, flash forward 88 years as the rest of the passengers finally wake up and what do they see? It turns out that Chris has continued his truly reckless gardening in the central plaza in order to please Jennifer's need for greenery -- and now it's spread to the point where the whole area resembles a vast forest. This is, I imagine, supposed to make us happy at the "world" that Chris and Jennifer made for themselves.
Personally, in watching this, I could only think of two things.
One, I could only imagine the unimaginable damage that uncontrolled plant like and root systems can cause when it starts to work its way through electronic and mechanical systems.
Second, I couldn't help but picture the generations of inbred Chris/Jen mutants that would begin to crawl out from under the roots and start to feast on the helpless Passengers - this would no doubt be the subject of the Sequel, Passengers 2 -- The Devouring.
To Be Continued ---
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