PASSENGERS Left A Bad, Creepy Taste In My Mouth

Now playing at multiplexes from here to Homestead II:

PASSENGERS (Dir. Morten Tyldum, 2016)

Despite that the screenplay has been floating around online for a while, and because I didn't click on anything that went into more detail about the plot, all I knew going in was this sci-fi movie’s basic premise - i.e. two spaceship passengers played by Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence on a 120 year voyage to a new earth-like planet wake up out of hibernation 90 years early, fall in love, and work together to solve the mystery of why they were woken up.

What I didn’t know was that Pratt’s character, Jim Preston, actually wakes up from a pod malfunction a year before Jennifer Lawrence’s Aurora Lane, and because Jim is taken with Aurora (he’s never met her; he’s just watched her passenger profile video over and over) he sabotages her sleep pod so that she’ll wake up and they can be together.

Sounds pretty creepy, huh? No wonder the film's trailers, and TV spots gloss over that crucial plot point.

The film, written by Jon Spaihts (DOCTOR STRANGE, PROMETHEUS, THE DARKEST HOUR), bends over backwards trying to justify Jim’s actions. 

It shows us that Jim, a mechanic back home, goes through months of desperately trying to break into the ship’s control room, becoming suicidal from loneliness as he wanders drunk and pantless around the corridors of the ship, which is named the Starship Avalon, where his only friend is a robot bartender named Arthur played by Michael Sheen (a role that in dress and demeanor largely recalls Lloyd, the hotel bartender in THE SHINING).

Jim also doesn’t just wake up Aurora on a whim; he goes back and forth about it for weeks, and talks it out with Arthur, but from him he only gets responses like “Jim, these are not robot questions.”

When he finally decides to wake up who he thinks is his dream girl, he tells Arthur not to tell her, and he makes sure he hides the tools he used to tamper with her pod.

Lawrence’s Aurora is in a daze at first, going through some of the same motions that Jim did involving desperately trying to come up with a solution to being “stranded in space with a stranger” as she puts it.

Aurora is a writer and her plan was to travel to this new world, dubbed Homestead II, live there for a year then return home after another 120 year journey back – that’s right, she bought a round trip ticket – so that she could write the first book about the earth’s distant twin.

Finally, after giving her space, Jim asks Aurora out and before long they are in love – eating at the fancy restaurant facilities, engaging in holographic dance-offs, and going outside the ship in spacesuits where they knock helmets in place of their first kiss.

Then Arthur, that damn robot bartender has to go and ruin it by telling Aurora that Jim deliberately woke her (Arthur misunderstands it when the couple agrees that they “have no secrets”) and Aurora is livid.

Equating it to him murdering her, Aurora angrily withdraws all contact with Jim and ignores his pleas – one of which is broadcast around the ship – for understanding.

This all changes when somebody else wakes up - Laurence Fishburne as Chief Gus Mancuso, one of the Avalon’s high ranking staff members, and they all find out that the vessel is in extreme danger due to more major malfunctions, so the last act is a high octane fiery climax in which our leads fight to save the ship.

PASSENGERS goes from funny (Pratt’s early one man show scenes before he commits his questionable act) to creepy (the couple’s icky, yet stylish, courting scenes) to a routine sci-fi action thriller scenario, to creepy again (the ultra stupid ending, which I won’t spoil).

Lawrence and Pratt are two attractive, likable movie stars whose talents deserve a better, more thoughtful sci-fi platform than this, or at least one that doesn’t leave such a bad, creepy taste in my mouth.

It feels like Morten Tyldum (THE IMITATION GAME) and Co. took the standard rom com narrative, in which the male protagonist does something unforgivable and is rejected in the first half of the film, but redeems himself in the eyes of the female protagonist with a heroic feat in the third act, and they tried to go all GRAVITY and INTERSTELLAR on it.

The aforementioned screenplay for this film has been around for nearly a decade, and at one point was almost made with Keanu Reeves and Reese Witherspoon, and that alone should confirm the rom com-iness of this material.

The film, as shot by cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (THE WOLF OF WALL STREET, ARGO, BABEL), is as good looking as its leads, and there are a number of amusing moments, but overall PASSENGERS is a A-list actors lost in space letdown.

If you want to see a great movie starring two talented good looking A-listers, there’s a certain musical opening on Christmas day. I’ll fill you in about it soon.

More later...

THE IMITATION GAME: The Film Babble Blog Review

Now playing at an indie art house (and some multiplexes) near me:

THE IMITATION GAME 
(Dir. Morten Tyldum, 2014)

This historical biopic is the perfect storm of a holiday season prestige picture.

It’s got the ‘true story of a hero who triumphed against all odds’ scenario. It takes place during World War II. In Benedict Cumberbatch, it stars an A-list leading man that people haven’t gotten sick of yet. It’s got Keira Knightley. It’s got a distinguished supporting cast. It’s got a sweeping score by acclaimed composer Alexandre Desplat. It’s being distributed by the Weinstein Company.

Yeah, it’s got Academy Award fodder written all over it.

But wait, for Morten Tyldum’s THE IMITATION GAME, which tells the story of Alan Turing, the mathematician and logician who cracked a German code helping to win WWII, is a much livelier, wittier, and all around more entertaining piece of Oscar bait than just about anything else in the current crop of contenders.

Especially when it’s compared to James Marsh’s bland Stephen Hawking biopic THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING, or Bennett Miller’s unengaging FOXCATCHER.

Turing’s tale is told through flashbacks to the late ‘30s through the mid ‘40s from the vantage point of the early ‘50s when the police, in particular Detective Nock (Rory Kinnear), are investigating a suspicious burglary of Turing’s home in Manchester, England.

This is where we first meet Cumberbatch’s Turing, who comes across like a blend of his own Sherlock Holmes, with Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, and Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory in his amusingly heightened arrogance about his superior intelligence. 

After Detective Nock sizes Turing up as an  “insufferable sod” who may be hiding something, the film flashbacks to 1939 London right as war is being declared on Germany. The 27 year old Turing, then a Cambridge undergraduate in mathematics, is recruited by Britain’s top secret Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park to be part of a team of the country’s top cryptographers to try to crack the Germans' “Enigma” code.

Turing considers the code “the most difficult problem in the world” and is determined to solve it, not caring about alienating his colleagues, which include Matthew Goode, Allen Leech, and Matthew Beard, or pissing off his superiors, which include Charles Dance as a highly irritated British Commander and Mark Strong as the icy head of MI-6, with his methods. 

Through a newspaper crossword puzzle competition, a young woman named Joan Clarke, played pristinely by Keira Knightley  comes aboard the project, and goes on to have a close relationship with Turing, despite the fact that he's a homosexual.

The film skip seamlessly skips back and forth from wartime to the investigation of Turing in the '50s (even including some flashbacks within flashbacks of when our protagonist was a school boy), even making space for some WWII footage (maybe its most unnecessary element - I mean, we have the History Channel for that), with a very pleasing pace. 

Many have pointed out that this film, which is based on Andrew Hodges' 1992 biography “Alan Turing: The Enigma,” takes a lot of liberties with the facts concerning what really went down at Bletchley Park.

I.e. the real life Turing didn't singlehandedly invent and build the machine that broke the code, he didn't name the machine Christopher after his first lover, the police didn't uncover Turing's homosexuality while investigating him for being a possible Soviet spy, Turing didn't have any contact with the actual Soviet spy John Cairncross (played by Leech) who's depicted in the film as threatening to expose Turing's homosexuality if he blows his cover, and Turing wasn't a cold humorless robot who wouldn't understand an invitation to lunch.

But despite these fabrications, or possibly because of them, the film is a rousing experience with a compelling narrative drive. Graham Moore's elegantly written screenplay makes the biopic formula feel fresh again, and power and passion that Tyldum brings to telling Turing's noble story can be felt in every frame. So much so that its abundance of inaccuracies can be forgiven as conventions created for dramatic effect.

The fine performances by Cumberbatch, Knightley (this sure makes up for LAGGIES), and their fellow thespians are no small part of how well this machine of a movie works as well.

THE IMITATION GAME will undoubtedly and deservedly get major award season action, but don't dismiss it because it so blatantly looks like it was designed just for that. It's a thoroughy engrossing introduction for movie goers to the basics of why Turing is incredibly important to our modern world, but folks who see it should really do a little reading up on the man too.

More later...