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#JustWatched Passengers (Morten Tyldum, 2016)


Low expectations, even lower results.

This actually started out pretty decent. Chris Pratt's character waking up alone, ninety or so years ahead of schedule. The natural process of hope, denial, living in the moment and then depression. Naturally he'd be tempted to wake someone else up so he's not alone but he's well aware he's condemning them to the same life hes's been suffering for a year.. The moral quandary was handled pretty well, even to the point where he wakes Jennifer Lawrence up and you can see he instantly regrets it. It continued to be interesting tothe point where they fall in love and she inevitably finds out the truth. Her reaction was exactly as it should have been. I was interested to see where this would go. How would they exist together on the ship, both of them knowing he condemned her to die. Then all that potential went flying out into the vacuum of space.

The ship goes wrong. Laurence Fishburne wakes up. His character is called Mr Explainstheplot. He sticks around long enough to tell them what's wrong with the ship and to tell J-Law that she should forgive the man that's basically her captor and murderer. Mr Explainstheplot then dies because he's done his job and he's too old and black to hang around the sexy young white people anymore. Get out of here Mr Explainstheplot. Then we have some awful, cheesey lines from Chris Pratt about going outside of the ship to fix it because "it's the only way" and he'll probably die. Then J-Law does some awful, cheesy pleading with him not to do it because he'll probably die. But of course he does it anyway and of course he survives and of course she basically kisses him back to life and of course everything is forgiven and of course they live happily ever after before they die of old age and boredom because this film could have been something really interesting but instead it became utter turd material.

I've just realised that the writer of this also wrote Prometheus. Wish I'd known that beforehand.

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