Film Review by Lew Ritter
PASSENGERS is the mega-budget pairing of two A-List stars in what promised to be the must see Sci-Fi thriller of the Christmas Season. It is about the giant Starship Avalon, a giant spaceship /arc containing five thousand sleeping passengers. They are hibernating in pods on a one hundred twenty year journey to a green, undisturbed new planet.
Along the way, the spaceship suffers a meteorite strike, and one of the pods malfunctions. It belongs to JIM PRESTON (Chris Pratt) an engineer looking for a new life. He had spent most of his life savings starting a new life on the new world. Jim awakens from hibernation. To his dismay, he awakened ninety years before the ship would reach its final destination.
Jim becomes the modern Robinson Crusoe of outer space. He is alone on a giant technological marvel of a space ship with all the amenities except company. ARTHUR (Michael Sheen) is Jim’s Friday, a chatty, robot bartender. After a year of solitude, the joys of the technology have worn thin and his thoughts turned to suicide. He steps out of the ship’s airlock and for a moment, contemplates plunging into the dark void of space.