I’m on vacation in Tucson, staying in a tiny house and I just watched “Passengers” on a tiny TV– but it sucked huge. The suckage doesn’t fit in this tiny house and it needs a place to go and that place is here.
“There is a reason they woke up.” Yeah. It’s because Chris Pratt is a total asshole.
It’s the future and Earth sucks so a big company ships 5,000 rich people through space to a new planet called Homestead II. Of course it takes hundreds of years to get there so everyone is tucked away snoozing in pods. Chris Pratt’s pod (don’t remember his character’s name, don’t care) malfunctions and he wakes up 90 years early. He spends a year never shaving probably because he saw “Castaway” and thinks that’s what you’re supposed to do with your stranded time.
But while Tom Hanks manages to cope for four years by building a meaningful relationship with a volleyball, this guy can’t deal with being alone for one year— even though he has 3-D Dance Dance Revolution AND a full bar with a British android bartender– and so he caves and ruins Jennifer Lawrence’s life by waking her up because he’s a big dumb awful man baby.
AND HE FUCKING TALKS WITH HIS MOUTH FULL. After he lies to her and tells her both their pods just happen to have malfunctioned and she’s coming to grips with the fact that she will die on this spaceship, she shares some of her “Gold Class” breakfast with him because he’s been, boo-hoo, eating Cheerios for a year.
Then he starts talking to her through a wad of scone and I screamed “OPEN THE POD BAY DOORS HONEY AND JUMP!” That shit is bad enough when you can actually kick someone out of your house for doing it, or just never text back or whatever, but being resigned to a lifetime under fluorescent lights with full-mouth-talking Space Pratt? I’d be fumbling for those cyanide capsules. Or a crowbar. Either way the movie would be more interesting.
But because this is a Lifetime in space– a Lifetime movie in space– of course this happens:
And this:
Ugh those shoes. Anyway they do dumb romantic shit like they have a choice and she says baffling things like “for the first time in my life I don’t feel alone” until the British android bartender spills the beans that Chris woke her up on purpose.
Then a crowbar actually does make an appearance. She flips out on him, heaving the anachronistic tool above her head, almost making the movie a good one; I can’t believe there are no pictures of the crowbar scene. But she reins it in and the rest of the movie is just her being frosty to him until some bigger spaceship problem happens and they have to work together to save the day.
Blah blah she ends up saving his life with the old “my spacesuit tether is still connected and I’m brave” trick and there is much weeping and trauma bonding and probably also a lot of Stockholm Syndrome.
Of course there had been no way for them to crawl back in their pods and go back to sleep because movie, but in all the hullabaloo Chris finds out that the medical pod has a “suspended animation” feature.
The talking-while-eating was bad, but here’s where the movie gets truly dark if you ask me. There’s only one medical pod and Chris is all “you take it– you can go back to sleep now.” Are you fucking kidding me? You were such a weak, blubbering, piece of shit that you had to destroy her life because you were BORED and now you’re like “it’s ok, I’ll be fine, go live your life” and basically manipulate her into saying “no, I can’t leave you,” thereby assuaging all your guilt about having selfishly woken her up in the first place???
And then they get married the end.
