'Passengers': Just Two Attractive Celebrities Fucking In Space Or A Glorification Of Stalking?

passengers

Disclaimer: SPOILER ALERT… you have been warned!

The trailer for Passengers shows, essentially, the plot of the entire movie. If you’re excited by seeing Andy Garcia with a giant (Andrew Mastian) beard, well, guess what: he clocks about as much time in the finished film as in the trailer, showing up only for the final scene, and not saying a word. That bit where Jennifer Lawrence is dragging Chris Pratt’s lifeless body in from space —guess whether she manages to bring him back from the dead at the last moment!— happens with a solid five minutes left. It’s the showstopper moment. If that is too ‘spoilerz’ for you, um: the trailer for Passengers shows, essentially, the plot of the entire movie.

But one delicious detail is left out of this promotional reel. You could say this is because it is the central emotional drama at play. Or, perhaps, you could say that it was left out of the trailer because it’s totally fucking creepy, so creepy that it essentially ruins the movie. Oh, and, the movie? Well:

Space! The final frontier. The place where gleaming CGI vessels glide through the stars, in search of future planets, whilst locations and facts are teletyped on screen —you bet your sweet ass with an audible beep for each keystroke!— in a sans-serif typeface. The Starship Cliché is en route to a newly-colonised planet branded Homestead II, a real-estate development so exurban the commute is 120 years. The passengers who’ve plonked their hard-earned down to book passage on this glorious space-Titanic don’t have to make the drive, though, instead bedding down to cryogenically-sleep their Homestead roadtrip away.

But, lo!, there’s a spanner —or, indeed, an asteroid— in the works. A collision begets a malfunction, and Pratt-dogg is accidentally awoken 90 years too early. Thus, this space palace becomes a glittering tomb; sentencing our hero-bro —an implausibly-buff mechanical engineer— to a lonesome life of ersatz luxuries, his only companion an android bartender (Michael Sheen) beamed in from The Shining.

In its early stretches, Passengers shows some promise as a satire of corporatisation and modern-day airline travel: Pratt’s attempts to find answers to his deathly conundrum via automated service prompts —all with chipper, friendly voices!— inhuman bureaucracy turned gallows comedy; the palatial spaceship’s five-star facilities soon shown to be but distractions from fragile mortality.

Life without people turns out to be no life at all. So, how to cure this manly —and screenwritten— conundrum? By introducing another character of course. So, along comes J-Law. Well, in a sense. Pratt, lonely and frustrated, finds himself drawn to the hibernation-pod in which the ship’s hottest, blondest single-gal-looking-for-love-on-another-planet dwells. Like some dating-app creep, he looks up her ‘profile’, views it over and over, obsessively, convincing himself that he’s falling for her, that they’re made to be together. Sure, he feels a bit bad about effectively sentencing her to the same imprisonment that has driven him to consider suicide, but, aw shucks, what’s a dude to do? Wake up another engineer or something?

And, so, Pratt arouses Lawrence from her celestial slumber, only, he pretends like he never did. And —shocker!— they fall in love. Is it Pratt’s chiselled jaw? The fact that he seems like a ‘nice guy’? Stockholm Syndrome? Who cares! It’s two attractive Hollywood celebrities, fucking in space! What a movie.

Eventually, that movie must move towards the rom-com reveal of Pratt’s dark secret —yes, the “you lied to me!” moment— at the end of the second act, which leads to a sad montage. She hates him now! How can he win back her heart? In the most masculine way imaginable, of course. By rescuing the ship, and all its passengers(!), in a big saves-the-day climax that shows his manly mettle for all to see. What woman could resist?

And, so, the guy gets his girl. You know, that one that he stalked, entrapped into a two-person space-tomb, sentenced to death in-transit, oh, and, lied to. If you thought Robert Pattinson in Twilight set the benchmark for glorification of stalkery, well, shit, at least Kristen Stewart got immortality out of that predatory sex-pest scenario. Lawrence just gets certain death. It’s so romantic!

allied

Allied trusses itself up in the veil of old-fashioned entertainment, but it’s a 21st-century approximation thereof. Robert Zemeckis —whose long, chequered career is filled with oft-artless exercises in cutting-edge-visual gimmickry— takes the old studio-picture model, and recreates it on a digital backlot. It’s a World War II spy-movie romance that takes place in Morocco, England, and France, but there’s nary a real location on sight. When Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard are sitting astride sand dunes in the sunrise, picnicking atop a London hill during the blitz, or fucking in a car in a sandstorm, they’re doing no such thing; these environments being wholly summoned by CGI.

This creates the kind of surreal —and, I suppose, ‘timeless’— quality of old Hollywood productions, which seems to be the point. Sometimes, the effect can be striking: as when Pitt and Cotillard speed away into the future together, a Lost Highway rolling out behind them; or when a night-time drop mission to a French airfield takes place in an evocative darkness of no place. But, most of the time, the cutesy quality of the visuals only serves as a reminder of how ersatz Allied’s emotions are.

Pitt and Cotillard are resistance agents working a sting in Casablanca(!), where they pose as a pair of married French socialites; the pantomime of emotions, duly, leading to real feelings. They’re hoping to score an invitation to a glittering Nazi gala, and, if that sounds a little like Pitt’s running back Inglourious Basterds in evening-wear, well, you wait ’til August Diehl shows up as a suspicious Nazi. The mission is realised early: the two show up to the soirée unimpeded, break out the semi-automatics, smoke everyone in sight, and flee safely; curtains suddenly drawn on a discrete first act. What to do next but get married?

Back in London, the pair shack up together and have a kid, whilst a string of crack character actors (Simon McBurney! Jared Harris! Matthew Goode!) play various military men. They warn Pitt that his wife may, indeed, be a double-agent workin’ for Germany, and after that stirring opening, what unfolds is, unexpectedly, a paranoia thriller about marriage; in which a seed of doubt causes a man to look at his idyllic life through fresh —or, perhaps, clouded— eyes.

In terms of the is-she-or-isn’t-she, Steven ‘Locke’ Knight’s script fabulously tilts back and forth, constantly shifting perception; Cotillard’s performance dancing on the knife-edge of innocence and guilt. Pitt’s increasing desperation plays as palpable, and there are enough grand-scale moments —a shot-down plane hurtling towards London townhouses; an escape from a night-time raid on a rural French prison— for it to appease action-movie blow-ins. But then comes a climax that ladles on the tragic-romance and Hallmarkian sentiment, with a years-later fantasy-fulfilment finale that’ll move few hearts, but many stomachs.