Movies: Passengers

Okay, so I took great pains not to read anything about this movie before seeing it. I was aware of some buzz about women being upset about it, but I didn't read any articles to figure out why. I didn't really even know how critics felt about it. Like, all I knew was what I'd seen in the trailers.

Turns out, it's a crap movie.

For a lot of reasons.

So let's go through a few of those reasons:

1. We're supposed to sympathize with the stalker-y character who ruins another person's life because he's lonely. And I almost can sympathize with him, but this movie is so written from a white hetero-male perspective it hurts.

2. The main female character is a writer. Ugh. Can writers please stop romanticizing their own craft? This character is practically flawless—she's a wonderful writer (whose father was a Pulitzer prize-winning writer as well), she's beautiful, etc. *gag* So we've compounded that white hetero-male perspective with this ethereal, beautiful writer thing. [And note: I'm a writer and I still hate this.]

3. Um, it was boring. Like, from the trailers we already gathered that Jim (Chris Pratt) had woken up Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence)—and can we just pause for a moment over the lack of subtlety in using Disney's name for the Sleeping Beauty princess?—so that was no big surprise. And then there was the, "We've gotta fix the ship and save everything!" part. And then it was over. No twists. And largely really boring because it was them talking and goofing around a lot of the time. Jesus, this movie could have been a short.

4. Not sure how I'm supposed to feel about the wronged woman falling in love with and forgiving her "captor" of sorts. More male fantasy. Excuse me while I vomit.

The only good thing in this movie was Michael Sheen as the android bartender. And I thought the ship was pretty cool. But this movie is so bad . . . The dialogue is fine, I guess, but the plot crawls and with all the above issues, the sum total = BAD . . . and yet the guy who wrote it continues to get tons of jobs . . . I really hate a system that rewards this kind of crap.* Guess I'll always be indie.

I still haven't read any of the articles about why women were upset, though I can certainly guess (see above list). I did just pop over to Rotten Tomatoes after the movie and saw that, while audiences found it middling (64% fresh), critics really disliked it (31%). Looks like I fall in with the critics here.

*I understand what's being rewarded is the fact that the movie made money. But I'd say reward the marketing team, not the writer who, in the end, received terrible reviews from the critics. This screenwriter also wrote Prometheus, which was awful as well. Maybe stop giving him these projects since he's proven he's bad at them?