Author Topic: Passengers, the sci-fi movie  (Read 2261 times)

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Offline Mika

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Passengers, the sci-fi movie
So, I happened to see the commercials of this movie during the Christmas, and the plot seemed quite good on paper. It was also advertised as a romantic (boo!) adventure (yay, there aren't too many such movies anymore).

A star ship on route from Earth to colonial worlds on a trip taking 120 years suffers a system malfunction and as a result, one person is woken up. The ship is travelling at half the speed of light, and the awakened person sees that the trip would still take roughly 90 years before reaching its destination, effectively taking him to the space, but never being able to actually arrive on location. With the rest of the passengers and crew (5000 people) all sleeping.

This sounds interesting, doesn't it?

Unfortunately, even with good special effects and actors, this movie is simply not good. The first 30 minutes work well laying the groundworks, but the script is otherwise weak and illogical - the movie takes no risks or doesn't expand anywhere. Of the adventure part, yes, there's like 20 minutes of it at the end of the movie. Unfortunately, it is not enough to carry through. It's annoying they managed to squander so many opportunities here. This could have been a thriller with the spaceship falling apart with people attempting to fix things, this could have been a space Titanic, or a race for survival. But it's actually none of those.

Truly a Hollywood Executive Board approved movie.
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Re: Passengers, the sci-fi movie
i much preferred passenger the iggy pop song
The good Christian should beware of mathematicians, and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bonds of Hell.

 

Offline Black Wolf

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Re: Passengers, the sci-fi movie
I'm pretty interested in how this does at the box office. It feels very much like a movie that was made based on a pair of pretty straightforward premises:

1. It came out of development hell in 2015, on the back of Gravity (2013) and Interstellar (2014). The Martian also did really well that year, though this was in production by the time it came out. Premise: Mid Budget, somewhat hard sci-fi makes a lot of money.

2. Chris Pratt had just come off Guardians, and was about to release Jurassic World. Jennifer Lawrence was headlining two of the biggest franchises on the planet at that point (X Men and Hunger Games). Premise: Famous, successful actors will sell a movie.

I think that both of those are inaccurate. Really good storytelling and to a somewhat lesser extent, really good effects sold tickets to Interstellar and Gravity. Same goes for The Martian and Arrival, 2016's actually successful hard(ish) sci-fi film. And as for star power, I think that the influence of a famous face on a poster - or even an actor who's legitimately super talented or audiences particularly like - is minimal in the current big budget movie market. And for these two in particular - both Pratt and Lawrence only really blew up as legitimate "movie stars" after exposure in major comic book movies. Granted, they'd both had success before that, but nothing that would have gotten them cast in a movie advertised almost exclusively on the celebrity of its stars.

I might be wrong, but based on the reviews that have come out, I'm expecting this to really struggle at the box office. If it does I just hope that Hollywood doesn't take it to mean "Sci-Fi doesn't sell anymore" and instead recognizes it to mean "A mediocre film wont sell tickets on the basis of famous leads anymore".
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Offline Mongoose

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Re: Passengers, the sci-fi movie
What really turned me off this movie was reading about the big "twist" a ways into it, which some people on the promotion side of things must have realized was a potential issue as there was absolutely no hint of it in any of the trailers I saw.

Spoiler:
So Pratt's character spends a decent chunk of the movie's beginning hanging around Lawrence's cryo-tube in his skivvies fawning over her, then makes the unilateral decision to wake her up early, essentially condemning her to death and creating a de facto Stockholm syndrome setup?  I need an adult.

 

Offline Black Wolf

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Re: Passengers, the sci-fi movie
What really turned me off this movie was reading about the big "twist" a ways into it, which some people on the promotion side of things must have realized was a potential issue as there was absolutely no hint of it in any of the trailers I saw.

I was on the fence about this movie based on the trailers, but the reviews have pretty much pushed this into airplane or netflix movie territory for me now, but I am curious about that twist - I found out about it unintentionally reading reviews that I thought would be lighter on spoilers.

Spoiler:
Do they treat it with any kind of maturity? Because that is one hell of a choice to make. The decision between living a life of permanent solitary confinement vs condemning someone else to die on a spaceship with you... that's one hell of a choice to make. The implications of either decision could make a really solid sci-fi think piece. If that sort of thing is explored at all, then I might find that I would like the movie more than the average critic.
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Offline Mongoose

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Re: Passengers, the sci-fi movie
The reviews I read made it seem like it was largely glossed over, even when the truth came out later in the film.

 

Offline MP-Ryan

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Re: Passengers, the sci-fi movie
Pretty much all the reviews I read were unanimous:  Skip this movie, it is terrible.
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Offline Klaustrophobia

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Re: Passengers, the sci-fi movie
I'm interested, but won't be a theaters thing unless someone invites me along.  Good looking premise, but DAMN do they seem to be forcing in the romance thing.  The trailers don't make it look the least bit natural and it seems to be the fuel they're using to drive the hype train.
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Offline Mika

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Re: Passengers, the sci-fi movie
I wouldn't say the movie is terrible, the CGI and actors are actually good. My final feeling of the movie is disappointment, once you figure that you could have yourself written the script better.

About the romance thing and Pratt's character waking up the girl, the movie expands this part extensively, giving it the time it needs. The action itself is understandable, and really, I can't say I wouldn't do the same if I were in his shoes. He goes on for about a year alone in the ship before waking the girl. Unfortunately, the script is lazy here, as Pratt's character supposedly gets interested of Aurora by the video logs she has done. These scenes are somewhat painful to watch, but Chris Pratt is trying his best. The script has quite a few cheesy lines there.

Unfortunately, the movie also takes away all the weight of waking her up as the ship would have exploded if she had not been awake. Additionally, there's of course the automatic infirmary table whose crew approvals actually list the possibility of getting Aurora back to cryo sleep. It's that she chooses to stay awake here.

Then the stupidities include: Spoilers!

Hidden Text: Show

1) Since the cryopods have never failed, there's no need for back ups. THEY. HAVE. NEVER. FAILED. (Mission critical system)

2) Only one automatic doctor table for the entire crew of 5000 people (Mission critical system)

3) The ship is travelling autopilot engaged with nobody awake. (Mission critical system)

4) The said autopilot can be shut down without waking up the ship's crew. (Mission critical system)

5) The ship's diagnostic systems can fail without waking up the ship's crew. (Mission critical system)

6) The ship's fusion reactor control computer can get damaged and it can still spread its calculation load to other cores (good), but the said other cores have not been designed to handle the data flow. This makes the fusion reactor control computer a Mission critical system. If the data is loaded to other cores, the crew is once again not alerted.

7) The ship can lose its artifical gravity without causing an immediate crew wake up. (Mission critical system). Once the artificial gravity was lost caused one of the more creative scenes in the movie which includes a swimming pool. Nuff said. It's just that the gravity is lost almost immediately, and the habitation modules are quite large. Once the motors spinning the modules run out of power, the modules keep on spinning until friction takes away the stored rotational momentum. BUT: THAT. DOES. NOT. HAPPEN. IN. SECONDS.


So when you have heard that for example, the control system of a military aircraft has four independent channels moving the flight control surfaces, leading to a system that is able to cope with one or two channels failing. The Avalon in Passengers is the opposite. It is designed to cause a failure in all four if a single channel fails.

Conclusion: this premise would have worked better as a space Titanic smashing to asteroids with them breaching the hull, and the frantic efforts of everyone attempting to save the ship, if she could be saved. All the above problems could be explained by corporate greed. Just like in actual real life Titanic.

You are better of saving your money, watch this from TV or Netflix, but please do not watch this at theaters or you'll be disappointed. Anyone looking for "Orbital stabilizer failure! Abandon ship! Abandon ship!" type sounds will be sorely disappointed. And while there are elements of adventure baked in there, that picks only up on the last 20 minutes.
« Last Edit: January 02, 2017, 02:53:18 pm by Mika »
Relaxed movement is always more effective than forced movement.

 
Re: Passengers, the sci-fi movie
The good Christian should beware of mathematicians, and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bonds of Hell.

 

Offline Firesteel

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Re: Passengers, the sci-fi movie
It's not unwatchable or even awful and the decision Chris Pratt has is an actually interesting one. The problem comes with the romance stuff being inorganic and Pratt and Lawrence not having great chemistry together. I appreciated a general lack of plot twists and how the first half of the movie had the shadow of Pratt's decision looming over it the whole time. The way Jennifer Lawrence finds out was, I thought, reasonably well done and it felt like something a program might actually do given such vague instructions.

The problems come in the second half with the ship systems failure and the last 20-30 minutes are horrible. They shoved every possible Hollywood cliche in to generate tension, meaning there was a complete lack of tension at the climax. The ending is completely saccharine and unearned. I'll admit I generally like my sci-fi bittersweet (thanks Freespace and most sci-fi novels I've read) but I'll take a saccharine ending if it's earned (for example Edge of Tomorrow's ending isn't great but I actually liked Cruise and Blunt's chemistry and I was fine with them getting a happy ending after watching them suffer for the entire movie).
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