Passengers (2016)

Score: 1 / 5

Adam meets Eve aboard the Titan A.E. and they fall in love while they save the human race. That's how the damned thing was advertised, right? And with two such bankable stars as Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence, I'm almost shocked that's not what happened, and yet I'm so horrified by what appeared on screen that I can't even start to wish for the film that might have been. For starters, the trailer was better than the movie, and if that's all you need to know, you can stop reading now.

Let's start at the beginning. Fair warning: I'm going to spoil the whole damn thing for you, because it would be far crueller to make you sit through the two hours of this intergalactic waste. We see the laughably stylized Avalon, cruising through space apparently unmanned, as its 5,000+ souls journey to a new world in hibernation. Asteroids pummel its shields because the high-tech, futuristic ship's autopilot can't correct its own course (good thing it didn't hit a star or planet!), but one large rock causes several systems to malfunction, apparently including a random hibernation pod -- that has nothing to do with anything that might have been affected by the asteroid -- holding a beefy Pratt. Great inciting incident, guys.

The science fiction element of the story begins and ends in the first act. Pratt (here mechanic "Jim") seeks answers but quickly learns his consciousness is the result of a malfunction, which the artificially intelligenced Titanic he's on arrogantly believes is impossible. He's stuck, alone, on a huge resort-ship ninety years away from its destination. During the course of a year in isolation, we see a nice little montage of Jim as he loses his sanity, going through stages of anxiety and fear, loneliness and mania, all in a delightfully PG-rated hedonism that culminates in an unfortunate-looking beard. Thankfully, this section also introduces us to the one decent part of the film, namely Michael Sheen as the robotic bartender "Arthur", though his screen time is cut woefully short.

Then the horror element kicks into gear, and it's the beginning of the end for Passengers. Starving for human interaction, Jim sets his sights on J-Law ("Aurora", wealthy writer who happens to be gorgeous too) and stalks her unconscious body, learning everything he can about her from her data files before he finally makes the supposedly torturous decision to force her pod to malfunction. Rather than focusing our attention on the horror of his action in condemning an innocent person to death, the filmmakers focus on the "trauma" Jim goes through in making the decision and subsequently keeping his deed a secret. The entire middle section of the movie is a perverse false romance, a study of Stockholm Syndrome between two beautiful people with good chemistry. I wonder, if the actors weren't so conventionally sexy, if this wouldn't have been a straight-up horror flick. But because they're pretty and funny and dress in nice clothes, we forget that their whole relationship is revolting.

The final act is bland trash, a time for director Morten Tyldum (The Imitation Game) to prove how inept he is at big-budget spectacle. Not long after Arthur reveals Jim's secret to Aurora, which sends her into a teenage rom-com rage of silent treatment, more of the ship's systems malfunction, forcing our characters to work together to find a solution. Thankfully (and stupidly), deus ex machina brings them Laurence Fishburne for about three scenes, a technician who has woken up and is apparently fatally ill from his pod's malfunction. After the nice older black man dies unceremoniously (um, outer space so white?), the two white "heroes" use his passkey to access obscure Staff-Only areas, where they discover an inferno of destruction that needs to be put out.

Obviously, the two need to work together, so Jim lays his life on the line while the damsel in distress stays in relative safety to shout inane shit like, "What? Where? What does that mean? Jim, how can we fix it? There has to be another way!" Of course it ends with the two of them surviving and falling in love again and dying of old age aboard the ship, with a nauseating final little moral in voiceover telling us to make the most of our given situation.

Regardless of how much we may like to see J-Law and Pratt in various levels of dress and undress, falling in love and making each other laugh, no amount of cutesy chemistry is enough to remove the disgusting taste of just how creepy the whole thing is. He's a terrible person. She's a badly written character, and the whole female-victimization motif in the film is shockingly opaque. It's telling, I might add, that the most exciting scene in the film takes place when she is swimming in the pool and the gravity goes haywire; it's positively panic-inducing for us as well as her. Well, I guess it takes something as drastic as imminent death in a disturbing way to feel climactic when the victim is essentially already the walking dead onboard a ship with an obsessive stalker and mental abuser. "Oh, it's already scary and bizarre? Okay, try to kill her with something more spectacular, that'll keep people interested."

Ethically, the film is a disaster zone. Tonally, it can't decide what it wants to be. Maybe it would have worked as a solid sci-fi romance, if the whole stalker-Stockholm thing wasn't there. Maybe it would have worked as sci-fi thriller, if the charm and romance were downplayed. I think it could have been a good horror-mystery if it were almost entirely rewritten and given to a competent director.

It's nice to watch a shitshow once in a while, to remember why the good ones really are good. It's just too bad this one seemed so much better in the advertisements.

IMDb: Passengers

The Imitation Game (2014)

Score: 4 / 5

A surprisingly cold and calculated film, The Imitation Game indeed feels much like a game throughout: one of secrecy and facades, one of brilliance and progression, and ultimately one for which the penalty is death. Our story concerns the life of one Alan Turing, a British mathematician who helped break the Enigma Code, and who was thus key to Nazi Germany's defeat in World War II. Seemingly as a reward for this success, he was criminally prosecuted for his sexuality and chemically castrated before his (alleged) suicide in 1954.

Benedict Cumberbatch performs Turing with his tried-and-true ability to clearly paint a character whose mind works far quicker and abler than most of us could imagine. But he also -- and rather unexpectedly, I thought -- delivers a powerhouse emotional performance, smartly masked by his adherence to cultural and social conventions (namely, what we might affectionately note as a stereotypical British aversion to emoting). In the few moments when his character does let his feelings loose, Cumberbatch bravely owns the screen with vulnerability and honesty. His own performance, I should say, isn't so much an imitation game as an Enigma code in its own right, and one that deserves still more brilliant minds to solve. And his supporting cast is not much less impressive. Kiera Knightley parries his every move with flawless empathy and energy; Matthew Goode and Allen Leech play Turing's complex and conflicted co-code-breakers, while Mark Strong and Charles Dance add strength as intelligence commanders for an operation so secret that even once the code has been broken they cannot disclose their success.

Director Morten Tyldum and writer Graham Moore, however, have created an endlessly watchable maze of intelligence and subtlety, and one that is in itself a most dangerous game of wit and skill. As you might expect, the "code" motifs and rhetoric of the film have seemingly endless parallels and riffs in morality, sexuality, society, and so forth, making the film constantly fresh and engaging. I don't particularly like the excess of "footage" interspersed throughout the film; I think the newsflash images are meant to ground us in the world and give us context, but for a film this intimate, all they do is take me out of the moment.

Interestingly -- and very significantly, as far as I'm concerned -- there is no "sex scene", no lurid kiss. I'm not aware of many films with a gay protagonist that haven't sought to exploit (or punish) his carnality, so I was very pleased with that [I should clarify: Turing himself (and in terms of the plot here) is punished for his alleged proclivities, but this film's commentary on that punishment is explicitly negative]. This omission fits quite well with this particular film, moreover, because so much of Turing's character is its own secrecy. We do, however, see his youth in school, as he apparently developed love for a fellow classmate; this kind of sentimentality at first put me off, but later I realized that, rather than forcing any rote sexual encounter into the film, our filmmakers wanted to emphasize a psychological and emotional approach to Turing's character. Bravo.

One last note: Alexandre Desplat's score is a knockout. I might be biased because he's one of my favorites, but it's really amazing here.

IMDb: The Imitation Game