Passengers

Don’t know about you but I miss the Joan Baez songs, but hey, there is a Bob Dylan song in its place! That isn’t all that confusing once you recognize that this sci-fail film centers around a lonely mechanic and his lovable “Roomba” bots who build an arboretum onboard a spacecraft, recalling Silent Running, a 1972 film from Douglas Trumbull. Traveling to colonize a distant planet, a malfunction causes Jim (Chris Pratt), a Colorado mechanic, to awaken from hyper-sleep 90 years too soon, facing the prospect of forced solitude for the remainder of his life. With his only companion an animatronic bartender, he interrupts the journey for Aurora, a writer hoping to be the first person to reach a space colony 120 years away, live there a year and then make the journey back to Earth.  What transpires is a monochromatic, passionless episode of The Love Boat but with none of the frisky crew. The “Avalon” ship features both rural shopping mall elegance and ominous hardware making it one of the more schizoid creations in the galaxy to have its design based on a 45 rpm record spindle. Actually, it’s all quite obnoxious.

[PG-13]