movie review the passengers 2016

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It’s lonely out in space, Elton John was able to observe as far back as 1972. Jim Preston, the character played by Chris Pratt in “Passengers,” learns this truth in a hard way. Jim is in a hibernation pod on the spaceship Avalon, headed from Earth to a colony planet called Homestead II, when the ship (which looks like a hybrid of a couple of crafts from “ 2001: A Space Odyssey ” embraced by a helix) goes through a meteor shower. This jars the craft, and causes his hibernation pod to open. A little while after awakening, and enjoying the amenities of the giant ship—it carries 5,000 passengers to help colonize the new world, and is fully stocked for a four-month period during which the sleepers are awake to get acclimated to their soon-to-be-home—he realizes something terrible has happened. He was awakened after only 30 years in space, and the Avalon won’t get to Homestead II for another 89 years.

This freaks Jim out a bit. He does have one friend on the ship, an android bartender, Arthur, played by Michael Sheen . But Jim, an engineer, is not particularly bookish—had his character been more like that of Burgess Meredith in that “Twilight Zone” episode about the last man on Earth and a library, we would not have a movie here—so he runs out of high-tech things to amuse himself with over the course of a year. He drinks too much. Grows a beard. (Or, rather, Pratt is fitted with a very unconvincing beard, full Kurt Russell in “The Thing,” and it doesn’t suit the actor, at all.) And then he develops a crush on another sleeper, one who looks just like Jennifer Lawrence , and is played, appropriately enough, by Jennifer Lawrence. He learns about her—her name is Aurora Lane, she’s a writer, nobody in her life has ever noticed that her name sounds like that of a thoroughfare—dreams about her, and eventually makes a very ill-advised decision. He wakes her up.

He makes it look like an accident, he commiserates with her as she freaks out, and he cultivates their friendship. As Humbert Humbert once noted of a protégé of his, “you see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.” Nevertheless, the movie is a little coy about developing their romance. But then again, the movie is always a little coy where it’s customary to be a little coy, just as it hits the most predictable beats while hammering its way to a conclusion that’s as egregiously contrived and corny as it is predictable.

This movie is directed by Morten Tyldum , who made 2014’s prestige picture “ The Imitation Game ,” and its direction is even more dutiful and personality-free than that of the Alan Turing biopic. The movie has a remarkably lumbering pace. The cliché-laden script—during one conversation with Aurora, Jim says “Can’t slogans be true?” which I reckon must be something screenwriter Jon Spaihts has asked in his own actual life—demands, of course, that Aurora learn of Jim’s deception. She does, and this was the point in the film when I felt compelled to look at my watch, and I was shocked to see we were only an hour into this 116-minute opus.

Despite their individual charms as performers, Pratt and Lawrence have very questionable chemistry. No matter how buff Pratt gets, his performing mode has an ineradicable “which way did he go, George?” haplessness to it, but that haplessness has some entitled bro notes as well. This makes Jim’s heinous action—“You murdered me,” an indignant Aurora screams at him, and she’s completely right—play even more despicably than had Jim been played by any actor with a genuinely creepy aura.

It gets worse. As their romance was blossoming, the ship’s systems had, unbeknownst to them, been failing. Things get really bad just as another figure, a casting choice that I’d like to think was a tribute to Paul W.A. Anderson’s “ Event Horizon ” but is probably just a coincidence, turns up to give some advice on fixing the craft’s nuclear core, and other stuff. “We’re stranded on a sinking ship,” Aurora observes, but the pair engages in all manner of Mr. Fix It derring do, complete with explosive bolts flying around and various sacrifices being proposed, made, and then rescinded by filmmakers committed to nothing more than letting Aurora and Jim have the very best make-up sex ever.

The movie’s production design is polished to the point of looking chintzy, and the special effects—well, let’s just say as elaborate as the movie’s zero-gravity sequence is (it involves an entire swimming pool’s water rising out of it’s enclosure, wowie-zowie), it reminded me of how much better “2001” did it. And I’m not even going to discuss, in detail at least, the elephant in the ideological room that “Passengers” inhabits, which is its spectacular sexism. The coeval to which is the movie’s sadistic requirement that Lawrence’s character swallow what’s been done to her by way of Pratt’s character proving himself “worthy.” Even if you believe in forgiveness, the way this movie stacks the deck to get to that place is, well, unforgivable.

Glenn Kenny

Glenn Kenny was the chief film critic of Premiere magazine for almost half of its existence. He has written for a host of other publications and resides in Brooklyn. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Passengers (2016)

Rated PG-13 for sexuality, nudity and action/peril.

116 minutes

Chris Pratt as Jim Preston

Jennifer Lawrence as Aurora

Michael Sheen as Arthur

• Morten Tyldum
• Jon Spaihts

Cinematographer

• Rodrigo Prieto
• Maryann Brandon
• Thomas Newman

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Review: Two ‘Passengers’ Trapped on a Spaceship Find Love Amid Despair

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By Stephen Holden

• Dec. 20, 2016

There is a blazing light at the center of the interplanetary romance “Passengers,” and its name is Jennifer Lawrence. In a love story whose attempt to be an interstellar “Titanic” eventually falls flat, Ms. Lawrence’s character, Aurora, is an ambitious journalist aboard the Avalon, a commercial spacecraft making a historic 120-year voyage. Its destination is Homestead II, a pioneer colony of an overcrowded Earth. The spunky, whip-smart Aurora, who bought a round-trip ticket, hopes to write the first book about Homestead II upon her return to New York.

But when Aurora is prematurely roused from a state of suspended animation, her hopes are dashed. Her awakener, Jim (Chris Pratt), is a hunky mechanical engineer who is jolted back to consciousness when an asteroid hits the Avalon and is aghast to find himself alone. Realizing that he faces 90 years of solitude on the spacecraft, can’t return to his hibernation pod and will never live to reach his destination, he begins to fall apart.

Spotting the recumbent Aurora, radiant in her pod, he savors her beauty, admires her thumbnail biography and falls in love. Against his better moral judgment, he revives her. Once outside her pod, Aurora is devastated to learn that she, like Jim, will almost certainly die en route to Homestead II.

But soon Jim and Aurora embark on a romantic courtship and quickly fall in love. Given their beauty, that may not sound bad until you consider their future in joint isolation with nothing to do but eat, drink, make love and play shadow games with holograms.

At its most gripping, “Passengers,” directed by Morten Tyldum ( “The Imitation Game” ) from a screenplay by Jon Spaihts (a collaborator on the scripts for “The Darkest Hour,” “Prometheus” and “Doctor Strange”), conveys the panic and despair of finding yourself trapped in a luxurious corporate prison in the middle of nowhere. Solitary confinement, even amid opulence, is solitary torture.

Even after “Passengers” ends, this creepy premise haunts your imagination. And the contrast between the chilly impersonality of the Avalon and the anguish of its human cargo lends the first half of the movie a desperate poignancy. Were I in Jim’s shoes, I would also drown my sorrows nightly the way he does at the well-stocked bar tended by a friendly android, Arthur (an amusing Michael Sheen).

Movie Review: ‘Passengers'

The times critic stephen holden reviews “passengers.”.

In “Passengers” Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt play hibernating travelers who wake up decades too early on a 120-year space journey. In his review Stephen Holden writes: At its most gripping, the film conveys the panic and despair of finding yourself trapped in a luxurious corporate prison in the middle of nowhere. Solitary confinement, even amid opulence, is solitary torture. Even after “Passengers” ends, this creepy premise haunts your imagination. And the contrast between the chilly impersonality of the space craft and the anguish of its human cargo lends the first half of the movie a desperate poignancy. But the film increasingly succumbs to timidity and begins shrinking into a bland science-fiction adventure whose feats of daring and skill feel stale and secondhand.

Their idyll abruptly ends when Arthur spills the beans to Aurora about Jim’s role in her awakening, and she explodes in a stunning fit of fury that is the movie’s dramatic high point.

In its more relaxed first half, “Passengers” allows room for needling satire of the airline industry. Depending on the ticket price, the 5,000 passengers can expect different levels of service once they’re revived in the journey’s final four months. As a “gold star” passenger, Aurora is entitled to a sumptuous breakfast, while Jim has to settle for cold cereal. We also learn that the corporation behind this space travel is a very successful operation.

Before its midpoint, the film begins its retreat from the moral questions raised by Jim’s selfishly dragging Aurora into his personal hell. He may be handsome and charming and mechanically adept, but he’s rather dull and inarticulate with no defined personality.

Aurora and Jim are the latest embodiments of Hollywood’s ever-evolving ideal of young lovers. Both are white and beautiful, with the likable Mr. Pratt suggesting a new-and-improved perfect specimen of a familiar jock type. It is Ms. Lawrence’s feisty wonder woman who warms the movie with her sizzling volatility and intelligence.

But “Passengers” increasingly succumbs to timidity and begins shrinking into a bland science-fiction adventure whose feats of daring and skill feel stale and secondhand.

Things briefly improve when another accidentally reawakened passenger, Gus (Laurence Fishburne), appears, and helps the couple figure out what’s wrong with the ship. But because his character is dying, his appearance amounts to little more than an extended cameo. It seems the asteroid strike set off the Avalon’s slow breakdown, and it is up to Jim, with Aurora’s help, to set things right, save them, and in the process redeem himself in her eyes.

In its haste to tie up loose ends as efficiently as possible, “Passengers” becomes a banal, formulaic pastiche of dozens of other like-minded space operas in which the human drama gives way to technological awe. And Ms. Lawrence’s light softens to a 40-watt glow. Except for one special effect, its action scenes are anything but awesome. None are more disappointing than the couple’s perfunctory, suspense-free spacewalks.

The one exception is a scene in which the gravity aboard the ship suddenly fails. Aurora is swimming when the water in the pool suddenly rises and she risks drowning inside an aquatic plume. Such delicious moments of movie magic are in painfully short supply.

Passengers Rated PG-13 for discreet sexuality, nudity and perilous action. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes.

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Film Review: Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt in ‘Passengers’

Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt are passengers who wake up in the middle of a starship voyage in a romantic sci-fi thriller that begins promisingly but gets lost in space.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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“ Passengers ” is the tale of a lonely guy in space, the drama of an ethical conundrum, a love story featuring two of the hottest actors on the planet, and a turbulent sci-fi action-adventure — and for all of that, it manages to be not a very good movie. The two stars, Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt , are both intensely gifted and easy on the eyes, and the film takes off from a not-bad idea, but the setup is way better than the follow-through. The director, the Norwegian-born Morten Tyldum, made the accomplished WWII brainiac spy thriller “The Imitation Game” (2014), but he turns out to be the wrong filmmaker for an amorous space opera. You can see why when he stages a scene that’s supposed to take us out of this world, but doesn’t.

We’re on the Avalon, a corporate starship that’s shaped like a spidery double helix. The spacecraft, which is headed for a prefab interplanetary colony called Homestead II (in the future, it seems, off-world lands will become franchises for those tired of life on earth), is carrying 255 crew members and 5,000 volunteer passengers, all of whom are in a state of suspended animation and set to stay that way for 120 years. That’s how long the voyage will take. But two of the passengers get woken up early: Jim Preston (Pratt), a mechanical engineer who’s jostled to consciousness in his hibernation pod after the ship hits a meteor, and Aurora Lane (Lawrence), a journalist whom Jim deliberately rouses from her slumber so that he’ll have someone to keep him company.

The two have all the food, alcohol, and entertainment they could want; there’s a basketball court, a video dance floor, and an elegant if empty bar presided over by a red-jacketed android named Arthur, played by Michael Sheen like the chipper robot cousin of Lloyd the bartender in “The Shining.” But unless either Jim or Aurora manages to live another 90 years or so, this voyage is going to eat up the remainder of their existence, and they’ve got no one but each other to keep each other company. Since they happen to look like Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt (stranded in space, you could do worse), it starts to seem like things will work out.

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They get to know each other and go on a “date,” at which point Jim tells Aurora that he’d like to take her to a place that’s “the best show in town.” He’s talking about a deep-space walk. The two don heavy-duty suits and, hanging by a tether, venture outside the ship, into the starry vastness, at which point you may flash back to other visions of flying human rapture — Christopher Reeve whisking Margot Kidder through the night sky in “Superman,” or George Clooney and Sandra Bullock (though they were just pesky colleagues) bobbing around in the awesome void of “Gravity.” In different ways, both those movies made your heart skip a beat. But in “Passengers,” the big romantic spacewalk is so perfunctory and visually rote that it’s about as stunning as a glimpse out the window of an airplane cruising over Cleveland. The scene is a harbinger of what’s to come, since the two actors spend the rest of the movie going through the motions of what turns out to be a flavorless and rather predictable fable.

Too bad! Because for its opening 45 minutes or so, “Passengers” is a reasonably cunning slice of commercial sci-fi, even as it overtly recycles the strategies of films like “The Martian” and “Moon.” When Jim first wakes up, he thinks the voyage of the Avalon is complete (the passengers are scheduled to come out of hibernation four months before the end of the journey). It doesn’t take long for him to realize, though, that something is amiss. He’s surrounded by chirpy holograms and talking food dispensers — but there’s no other live human.

The Avalon is like an abandoned cruise ship, and the movie serves up some witty tweaks of top-down corporate culture, like the way that Jim can’t order a first-rate cup of coffee (because he’s not a Gold Star passenger), or the fact that he can’t get through to anyone back on earth, because everything on the ship is programmed to stonewall you. (No information leaks out, even if your life depends on it.) The situation Jim finds himself in is a gnawing nightmare; it’s as if he’d been sentenced to die alone, in 50 years, of boredom. Pratt, beneath the jock sexiness, is a fine actor who lets his eyes dance with playful intent, and with a dash of panic. Jim tries to make a go of things, but after too many days of eating, drinking, and one-man hologram dance-offs, he enters his Jim Morrison-on-the-skids phase. The question is: Will he rouse a fellow passenger, 90 years before she’s scheduled to wake up, in order to save himself?

He knows that doing so is indefensible (it’s like playing God), but he also knows that if he doesn’t make the decision to screw someone else over, he’s going to go crazy. The way that “Passengers” forces Jim to weigh his choice, and puts the audience in his shoes, seems responsible enough. Yet that still doesn’t make it an infectious thing to build a movie around. Jim’s whole relationship with Aurora is based on a selfish and rather creepy act, as well as a lie (the implication that she woke up accidentally, the same way he did). He’s crafty about it, but we’re waiting for their romance to crash. Lawrence and Pratt match up nicely, because they’re such naturally responsive actors; they’re fast, with mutual radar. Lawrence, though a bit less vivid when she’s this blonde, gives Aurora a core of survivalist moxie. She will do what the circumstances demand. But can Jim keep his secret?

There’s only one place for “Passengers” to go, and once it gets there, Jon Spaihts’s script runs out of gas. That won’t necessarily hurt the movie commercially, since it offers the kind of big-star mashup that every holiday movie season needs. Tyldun handles the dialogue almost as if he were doing a stage play, but he turns out to be a blah director of spectacle; he doesn’t make it dramatic. (He does create one cool image, though, of a swimming pool freed from gravity.) There isn’t much to “Passengers” besides its one thin situation, and there are moments when the film could almost be “a very special episode of ‘Star Trek,'” because Pratt, with his golden-boy smirk, has a Kirkian side, and the voyage they’re on is grandiose yet amorphous (like the Enterprise’s). The ship itself has a variety of chambers and communal spaces, but it all seems overly familiar and sterile. What’s lackluster about “Passengers” isn’t just that the movie is short on surprise, but that it’s like a castaway love story set in the world’s largest, emptiest shopping mall in space.

Reviewed at AMC Lincoln Square, New York, December 14, 2016. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 116 MIN.

• Production: A Columbia Pictures release of an LStar Capital, Village Roadshow Pictures, Wanda Pictures, Original Film, Company Films, Start Motion Pictures production. Producers: Neal H. Moritz, Stephen Hamel, Michael Maher, Ori Marmur. Executive producers: Greg Basser, Bruce Berman, Ben Browning, David B. Householter, Jon Spaihts, Lynwood Spinks, Ben Waisbren.
• Crew: Director: Morten Tyldum. Screenplay: Jon Spaihts. Camera (color, widescreen): Rodrigo Prieto. Editor: Maryann Brandon.
• With: Jennifer Lawrence, Chris Pratt, Michael Sheen, Laurence Fishburne, Andy Garcia, Vince Foster, Kara Flowers, Conor Brophy.

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Passengers review: a terrific premise wasted on a terrible space romance

In space, no one can hear you scream "restraining order".

By Kwame Opam

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In the long history of movies that heap seemingly unending cruelty on their characters, few make as much effort to make that cruelty look charming and romantic as Passengers does. Two travelers, trapped alone together on a slowly self-destructing starship for just under a century, must find a way to survive, or they’ll go insane or pitch themselves into the cold vacuum of space. So… they go on dates instead. Ah, those two star-crossed lovers! “How sweet,” the movie begs us to say. The appropriate reaction is, “How horrifying!”

A space opera that attempts to blend Gravity with Titanic , Passengers is a pretty little film. It’s visually stylish, and it features two of the most attractive lily-white actors currently working in Hollywood. But underneath this glossy veneer is a truly ugly core. Don’t be fooled. Passengers wants you to believe in the power of love in the face of insurmountable odds, but in the end, it scans as a paean to inhuman, unconscionable behavior, justified in the name of sheer desperation. If Stockholm syndrome is the height of romance, we should all join hands and swear off romance together.

Passengers , written by Jon Spaihts and directed by Morten Tyldum ( The Imitation Game ), stars Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence as Jim Preston and Aurora Lane, two voyagers on the interstellar cruise ship Avalon, making their way to a distant planet. But things go wrong about 30 years into Avalon ’s 120-year sojourn, and Jim wakes up from suspended animation too soon. From that point on, he’s alone — save for affable robotic bartender Arthur (Michael Sheen), who does his best to keep Jim company.

‘Passengers’ squanders a genuinely intriguing premise about isolation and the limits of empathy

The film is at its best when it shows Jim — who’s charming, but never nails his Cast Away impression — doing his damnedest to stay sane in near-total isolation on the ship. The Avalon is one of the more fascinating bits of ship design to hit screens. The entire vessel is made to look like a living drill making its way through space. Its interior resembles a gorgeously constructed but abandoned hotel, full of recreation rooms, viewing galleries, futuristic helper robots, and no guests. That’s the point: Jim isn’t supposed to be alone, so Tyldum’s camera, always crisp and clear, frequently pulls us close to Jim, Arthur, and later Aurora, before pulling back out to expose their loneliness. This isn’t as unsettling as it sounds. Where this movie could easily reach The Shining levels of dread, the story and Thomas Newman’s score always return to the “sweet yet sad” setting on the dial. But there’s never any question that the situation is dire, and everyone is merely making the best of what they have.

But make no mistake: Passengers is ultimately Jim’s movie. Even though he’s about as bland as the cereal he’s forced to eat every day, the audience is chained to his fate from the outset. So when it’s time for Jim to make an impossible decision about whether to wake someone up for the sake of simple human contact, the audience is also obliged to wrestle with his colossal moral failing. What would anyone do in his shoes? This is a compelling question worth grappling with, and it’s the best thing the movie has going for it. It just makes no sense whatsoever that all this is packaged inside a romance.

Enter: journalist and proto-explorer Aurora Lane (no relation to Lois Lane), who must learn to live with the profound injustice of being woken up by a half-crazed man convinced he’s in love with her. That’s the actual text of the film, and it’s the movie’s principal failing. Aurora is an ambitious (though thinly written) woman looking for adventure and fulfillment, and Lawrence plays her ably, since she isn’t given much beyond “plucky writer and love interest.” But her character exists for Jim, and even though he wrongs her, the movie treats her plight as something for Jim to overcome.

This is deeply disturbing, even enraging, on its face — which Aurora later makes plain by acting out her frustrations with her fists, all over Jim’s face. But the film is mainly concerned with Jim’s good heart and redemptive arc. For a good stretch of the film, the characters are on one long date together, with scene after scene of fun dinners, red-dwarf-gazing, and sex. The movie certainly has its manipulative little charms, the rom-com moments designed to make us root for the two as a couple. But it also means the audience is expected to go along with the romantic premise, even after Aurora discovers the truth. Never mind that Jim lies to her, robs her of her future, and essentially sentences her to a lonely death in space, far from the place she thought she was going. Surely it’s enough that Jim apologizes over the ship’s PA, the score gently cheering him on. Surely love must conquer all, Passengers posits, because in space, no one can hear you scream “Restraining order!”

The movie strains to say something meaningful, but fails on all fronts

The ever-present danger on Avalon does provide Passengers with a few incredible action setpieces. In one, gravity fails, leaving Aurora drowning in a levitating pool. In another, the pair are nearly killed by a hole in the ship’s hull. Another character, played by Laurence Fishburne, gets involved to move the plot along, at which point the film doubles down on a familiar horror-movie cliché by killing off the only person of color for actual light years. After all the crisis and catharsis, the film strains to crescendo into something meaningful. But it falls flat thanks to its offensive resolution (spoilers, obviously): instead of living out her dream, Aurora decides to raise space chickens with the toxic man who fell in love with her picture.

For all its visual flourishes and fair-to-decent acting, Passengers is a failure of a movie full of missed opportunities. It’s trying its hardest to tell a deeply human story in all the wrong ways. Instead, it imparts utterly inhumane lessons. It’s the kind of movie whose raw materials could have made for a far better work in more capable hands, because a story that explores the limits of humanity and empathy in the face of extreme isolation is worth telling. Instead, Passengers ’ creators made a movie that confuses abject cruelty for love. There’s nothing romantic about that, and the entire universe deserves better.

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Passengers Reviews

Its science-fiction premise about lovers in space starts with promising questions, but soon approaches a horizon that lacks depth and is lost, from the beginning, in a black hole of clichés. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | May 13, 2024

Passengers has a lot going for it, but the entire treatment feels mishandled, misguided, and a missed opportunity.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Apr 5, 2022

Passengers biggest issue is its finale.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 14, 2022

The worse possible waste of a heap of charisma

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Jan 10, 2022

It becomes clear before long that the futuristic sci-fi outing Passengers, aka Grab 'Em By the P***y: The Movie, could only have been written by a man.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 17, 2021

As an exploration of human isolation and a moral fable about personal freedom, however, Passengers is threadbare and trite.

Full Review | Feb 22, 2021

A few tweaks could have turned it into a creepy look at Jim's desperation or an amusing film about technology gone wrong - imagine if Hal from 2001 was an automated customer service attendant - but instead its done in by the story's sexist undercurrent.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 3, 2021

Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence can't even save this sinking ship. This movie is a boat you should miss.

Full Review | Dec 23, 2020

The last-man-on-earth concept isn't exactly new, but adapting it into a far-flung intergalactic environment provides oodles of potential.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10 | Dec 5, 2020

An ultimately unsatisfying yet passable from a cast capable of and likely expecting so much more.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.0/4.0 | Sep 19, 2020

What he does next is unforgivable, as is his duplicitous cover up, but perhaps a smarter, bleaker film could have played it as a brutal moral dilemma faced by a desperate man who must then face the consequences.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 26, 2020

It's rare to find a film in which one problem is so morally reprehensible that it ruins the entire thing.

Full Review | Original Score: C- | Jul 15, 2020

There's a saying that in space, no one can hear you scream. After watching Passengers, in space, no one can hear you endlessly groan or watch you roll your eyes.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Jul 15, 2020

Passengers has no idea how to deal with the consequences of its choices, so it simply chooses not to.

Full Review | Original Score: D | Jul 2, 2020

I had fun in this movie.

Full Review | May 8, 2020

It was like a Nicholas Sparks action movie in space.

From here the movie descends into blandness and stays there until the whimper of an ending.

Full Review | Mar 30, 2020

The good news is, in six months, nobody will remember that Passengers ever existed.

Full Review | Feb 18, 2020

It's rare for being good sci fi that doesn't involve zapping things with ray guns. It's a story about how technology sometimes puts people in impossible situations that no human has ever been faced with before.

Full Review | Jan 15, 2020

The considerable charisma and chemistry of Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence keep the sci-fi adventure Passengers afloat, even if the script easily fixes its most fascinating problems.

Full Review | Jan 14, 2020

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‘passengers’: film review.

Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt play fellow passengers on a troubled interplanetary flight in 'Passengers,' an adventure drama directed by Morten Tyldum.

By Sheri Linden

Sheri Linden

Senior Copy Editor/Film Critic

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The meet-cute between Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt in Passengers isn’t so cute; it touches on messy ethical questions, and matters of life and death. As future-world earthlings en route to another planet, they’re supposed to be in a state of suspended animation, not awake and functioning and falling in love. But things happen when you’re in a sci-fi adventure.

There is, at first, a thrilling what-if in Jon Spaihts’ screenplay, which concocts a sort of Titanic in outer space, with dollops of “Sleeping Beauty” and Gravity thrown into the high-concept mix. Under less shiny, by-the-numbers direction, the story might have soared, or at least been more stirring. Yet while Passengers offers a few shrewd observations about our increasingly tech-enabled, corporatized lives, its heavy-handed mix of life-or-death exigencies and feel-good bromides finally feels like a case of more being less. Whatever the critical consensus, though, the marquee leads are sure to entice moviegoers seeking grown-up action-adventure.

Release date: Dec 21, 2016

As he showed in his first English-language feature, The Imitation Game , Norwegian director Morten Tyldum knows how to hit the prescribed emotional notes, but subtlety is not his strong suit. Even with striking visual design and seamless digital effects, he struggles to conjure an all-encompassing sense of wonder — and danger — from the deep-space setting, however insistent Thomas Newman’s score.

Among the quandaries that Passengers poses, the most terrifying might be “What if you were trapped on a cruise ship for the rest of your life?” In this case the ship is the Avalon, an ultra-automated luxury interstellar airliner that’s ferrying 5,000 paying passengers and 200-odd crew members, all enclosed in devices designed to keep them fresh and healthy and inanimate for the 120-year journey from Earth. At the other end of the trip is a new start on Homestead II, the antidote to “overpopulated, overpriced and overrated” Earth, as the marketing spiel of the project’s mega-profitable corporation describes it.

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For one passenger, mechanical engineer Jim Preston (Pratt), that new start offers a sense of purpose he’s found lacking on the home planet. Jim is a salt-of-the-earth, old-school kind of guy, the sort who believes in building things with his hands — apparently a skill that’s no longer in demand where he comes from. After a meteor hit causes a malfunction that releases Jim from his hibernation pod 90 years early, he finds himself wandering the cavernous Avalon — sleekly designed by Guy Hendrix Dyas — and seeking answers, in vain, from holograms and chirpy disembodied voices. It’s the three-dimensional equivalent of trying to reach a human being on a customer-service phone line.

But Jim’s situation is far more dire than being in telephonic limbo; unless he can find a way to return to his deep sleep, Jim will spend the rest of his life alone and die before reaching the promised land. When he finally finds a way to send a message to the company’s HQ, he’s assured that he can expect a response in about half a century.

So what’s a lost-in-space guy to do but avail himself of the fine dining, game rooms and VIP quarters? He becomes a regular in the dazzling jewel-toned bar where android bartender Arthur ( Michael Sheen ) dispenses robotic words of understanding and encouragement with a touch of human sympathy, if not understanding. By the time a second passenger is prematurely up and about, Jim has become a boozy slob who’s contemplating suicide. But instead of ending his life, he chooses to end his loneliness.

The other awakened passenger is writer Aurora Lane (Lawrence), who Jim first noticed as a sleeping beauty in her transparent hibernation pod. Here the screenplay touches on a perhaps burning question for these times — Can you truly fall in love with someone on the basis of their online profile? That’s what Jim creepily claims to have done while Aurora was in suspended animation. Once they’re awake together, their rescue options exhausted, they put aside the pressing sense of mortality and embark on a proper courtship in the well-appointed facilities.

She’s a Gold Class passenger — which entails far better breakfasts, for starters — and her aim is to return to New York on a round-trip ticket having written the first book about Homestead II. The pairing of working-class guy and creative-class jet-setter is explained more than felt, as are the motivating factors that led Jim and Aurora to take such an extraordinary leap into the unknown. Though they’re clearly tough and resilient, no underlying sense of urgency or drive comes through, especially not in Pratt’s even-keeled Mr. Fix-It. The necessary fire is missing from their chemistry, until Aurora’s fury at discovering a crucial piece of information that Jim has been keeping from her.

But both leads spring into convincingly treacherous action, inside the Avalon and on tethered space walks, as the ship’s various systems falter. They’re joined all too briefly by a knowledgeable crew member played by Laurence Fishburne — a vivid reminder that even with the highest technology the world has to offer, sometimes only a human being can provide the necessary information. (Appearing even more briefly is a wordless Andy Garcia .)

Before the emergency builds to a hectic, ineffective overload of factoids and feats, Tyldum stages a top-notch set piece featuring ace f/x work. The sequence, persuasively performed by Lawrence and dynamically shot by DP Rodrigo Prieto , involves a lapse in the ship’s gravity and its effect on the swimming pool where Aurora does laps in a stylish fishnet bathing suit ( Jany Temime’s elegant costumes make her the best-dressed woman in space).

Given the imaginative setup and the material’s provocative questions about mortality — not to mention the future of humankind — the movie’s neat lessons about the nature of happiness and a life well lived feel too easy, too obvious. It’s enough to make you wonder if the work that Aurora longs to write has been a self-help book all along.

Distributor: Sony/Columbia Pictures Production companies: Columbia Pictures, LStar Capital, Village Roadshow Pictures, Wanda Pictures, Original Film, Company Films, Start Motion Pictures Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Chris Pratt, Michael Sheen, Laurence Fishburne , Andy Garcia, Emma Clarke Director: Morten Tyldum Screenwriter: Jon Spaihts Producers: Stephen Hamel , Michael Maher, Neal H. Moritz, Ori Marmur Executive producers: David Householter , Ben Browning, Jon Spaihts , Bruce Berman, Greg Basser , Ben Waisbren , Lynwood Spinks Director of photography: Rodrigo Prieto Production designer: Guy Hendrix Dyas Costume designer: Jany Temime Editor: Maryann Brandon Composer: Thomas Newman Casting: Francine Maisler

Rated PG-13, 116 minutes

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Passengers (I) (2016)

• User Reviews
• scifi effects are very good
• ship is beautifully designed
• space looks authentic
• actors are believable characters and do a great
• as a scifi lover this is something you can watch with non scifi lovers as the plot is about fighting loneliness, building relationships, and trust.
• storyline is very predictable and a bit dull
• It takes quite a long time before something is "at stake"

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Common sense media reviewers.

Interesting drama about love, mortality, iffy decisions.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Promotes courage and forgiveness, which can lead t

Aurora is open, adventurous, and willing to ask h

A spaceship has a massive mechanical failure that

A couple has sex; naked backsides, including butto

Some swearing, including "damn" and "s--t."

Social drinking by adult characters; one character

Parents need to know that Passengers is a romantic sci-fi drama about two people (Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt) who find themselves on spaceship headed toward a distant planet with nobody else to keep each other company. It takes on thought-provoking themes like loneliness, agency, identity, and…

Positive Messages

Promotes courage and forgiveness, which can lead to closure. But the decision that one character makes completely takes away another's choices/power.

Positive Role Models

Aurora is open, adventurous, and willing to ask herself difficult questions. To a certain extent, Jim is, too, but he also makes a decision for her that she might never have wanted, forever altering her life (in other words, this isn't a "girl power" story).

Violence & Scariness

A spaceship has a massive mechanical failure that threatens the lives of those on board. Viewers see it play out in large-scale accidents, including a scene in which a character nearly drowns. In another scene, a character is stabbed by shrapnel and pulls it out. Loud arguments. A character has a health emergency and coughs up blood. A character almost commits suicide. A woman is so angry she hits someone.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A couple has sex; naked backsides, including buttocks, are briefly seen. Additional scenes of Jim's naked bottom and Aurora in a swimsuit. Kissing/making out. Aurora changes out of her dress, but nothing sensitive shown.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Social drinking by adult characters; one character gets drunk and belligerent.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Passengers is a romantic sci-fi drama about two people ( Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt ) who find themselves on spaceship headed toward a distant planet with nobody else to keep each other company. It takes on thought-provoking themes like loneliness, agency, identity, and mortality (as well as courage), and it all hinges on a decision that one character makes without another's ability to weigh in, removing her ability to make her own life choices. A spaceship has a massive mechanical failure that threatens the lives of those on board. Viewers see it play out in large-scale accidents, including a scene in which a character nearly drowns. You can also expect sex scenes (naked buttocks shown, but nothing more graphic), kissing/making out, and some swearing ("s--t," "damn," etc.) and drinking -- sometimes to excess. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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• Kids say (60)

Based on 35 parent reviews

Entertaining movie but...

Don't look at the bad reviews, because those are misjudging this wonderful movie., what's the story.

In PASSENGERS, Jim Preston ( Chris Pratt ) is an engineer who decides to join thousands of others on the Avalon , a spaceship whose passengers are supposed to stay in an induced state of deep sleep for 120 years while they travel to a deep space colony. But just 30 years in, Jim wakes up due to a mechanical glitch, effectively leaving him on a desert island, with the clock ticking toward death. He's alone and lonely, save for the company of an android ( Michael Sheen ). So when Jim spots Aurora Lane ( Jennifer Lawrence ), composed and beautiful in her sleep pod, he's smitten. He researches her and her life and grows more enamored by the day, ultimately arriving at the decision to wake her up. But this means taking away Aurora's plans to live out her days on the colony, forever altering her life plans and taking away her power over herself. Meanwhile, the Avalon seems to be in trouble.

Is It Any Good?

Pratt and Lawrence are wonderful and share decent chemistry, and Sheen adds wit, but, there's no mistaking the disturbing nature of this movie's premise. Positioned as a romance and at times offering insight into the nature of relationships, Passengers nonetheless tries to succeed while grounded in a plot that's frankly off-putting. Are we to see Jim as a harmless romantic, when his love for Aurora is based on expectations he placed on her without truly knowing who she is and his subsequent decisions are pretty much positioned as forgivable in the face of love? The special effects make for a visually stunning movie, and the film's complicated themes make it a knotty, interesting watch. But the film's problematic nature does distract from its strengths.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how Passengers depicts relationships. Is Jim and Aurora's relationship healthy? How does the movie portray sex ? Parents, talk to your teens about your own values regarding these topics.

Are the main characters role models ? Why or why not? How do they/the movie promote courage and communication ? Why are those important character strengths ?

Why do you think someone would remove themselves from their present life to live one more than 100 years away?

How does the film handle a romance that's complicated and based on a pretty disturbing decision? Does it gloss over that decision? Does it find a way to justify it? Is Jim just "a hopeless romantic"? How would you feel in Aurora's position?

How does this movie compare to other sci-fi tales/dramas you've seen? Who do you think it's intended to appeal to? How can you tell?

Movie Details

• In theaters : December 21, 2016
• On DVD or streaming : September 25, 2018
• Cast : Jennifer Lawrence , Chris Pratt , Michael Sheen
• Director : Morten Tyldum
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Columbia Pictures
• Genre : Science Fiction
• Topics : Space and Aliens
• Character Strengths : Courage
• Run time : 116 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : sexuality, nudity and action/peril
• Last updated : April 24, 2024

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Passengers Doesn't Realize It's a Horror Movie

By Scott Meslow

It's uniquely disappointing to need to pan a movie like Passengers . This is an original, $110 million sci-fi/thriller/romance , produced from an extremely well-regarded script that appeared on the Black List nearly a decade ago—a genuine rarity at a time when Hollywood is obsessed with churning out new installments of time-tested franchises and sequels and reboots. It’s a movie that takes real risks, and if it didn’t star two of the biggest movie stars in the world, it probably wouldn’t have been made at all.

So I hope Hollywood will ultimately judge Passengers as a disastrous failure of execution, not of concept. This is a movie so completely miscalculated that it doesn’t even understand its genre . At heart, this isn’t a sci-fi romance—it’s a sci-fi horror movie.

"Before our sex scene I drank Pepto-Bismol."

By Clay Skipper

Passengers begins promisingly enough, as Jim (Chris Pratt), an engineer and would-be colonizer of a new planet, awakens from a malfunctioning hibernation pod to discover that he has accidentally been woken up 30 years into a 120-year journey, which effectively dooms him to a lifetime alone on a fancy spaceship. It isn’t until later, when a second human protagonist emerges, that the narrative problems begin. (In retrospect, the decision to treat Passengers ’ basic premise as a plot twist was a sign that Sony’s marketing team knew there was something unforgivably rotten at the movie’s core—but if you’d rather not know what happens next, you can stop reading here.)

After more than a year of solitude, Jim gets completely obsessed with a stranger locked safely in her own hibernation pod: Aurora, presumably named after—cue the groans—the princess in Sleeping Beauty . Jim's fixation begins because Aurora is played by no less a beauty than Jennifer Lawrence, but Passengers makes an unconvincing effort to add some depth to the one-sided love affair by making Jim binge-watch a few of Aurora’s personal video logs. After flirting with the idea of committing suicide, Jim finally decides he’ll solve his all-consuming loneliness by breaking Aurora out of hibernation to serve as the Eve to his Adam on this big empty spaceship. And after he does it, he lies, telling Aurora that her hibernation pod must have malfunctioned too.

These are the seeds from which one of 2016’s queasiest cinematic romances begin to sprout. If Passengers was so intent on making us root for this romance to succeed, there are plenty of ways that it could have softened the selfishness of Jim’s choice. Jim could have discovered a damaged part of the ship that required a second person’s help to repair. Or Aurora could have been an engineer, making her expertise vital as Jim attempted to figure out if there was any way for him to get back into hibernation. Either of those options would have preserved Jim’s arc, and the guilty secret he harbors, while making his wrenching decision somewhat more sympathetic and justifiable.

Instead, Passengers commits itself to the darker and arguably more interesting twist: Jim is a lonely creep who decides to wake up Aurora, specifically because he thinks she’s hot. And then, having lied about what happened, Jim maneuvers her into a sexual relationship that only ends when a well-intentioned robot tells Aurora that Jim deliberately doomed her to this life with him.

And Passengers knows how disturbing this is! When Aurora learns Jim deliberately pulled her out of hibernation, Lawrence gives it her all as an actress, collapsing to the ground like she’s been punched in the gut. As you would, if you learned that a stranger effectively doomed you to a lifetime of isolation, and then manipulated you into a romantic and sexual entanglement that works, in part, because he’s the only living person you’ll ever see again.

And this is where Passengers could have gotten really bold. We’ve taken a sudden pivot from romance into horror movie—and executed correctly, that’s exactly how the third act would have played out. Trapped on the ship with Jim, Aurora would have had her own painful choice to make: spend a lifetime alone, by avoiding Jim or killing him—or make some kind of peace with this handsome, genial creep who selfishly and secretly rewrote the entire course of her life to suit his personal desires.

In the wake of the revelation, Jim takes to the ship’s communication speakers to attempt an apology, and it is genuinely skin-crawling to watch Aurora stuck, alone, with no way to block out the simpering voice of her captor. Suddenly, we’re in the middle of a sci-fi riff on The Shining : a woman stuck alone with a man who’s clearly not who she believed him to be. Again, bizarrely, Passengers seems to hint that this is the natural direction for the story to go: Arthur, the bartending robot played by Michael Sheen, is clearly modeled on the bartender from The Shining . And told this way, Pratt’s innate likability could have been a secret weapon in the movie’s arsenal—earning him our natural sympathy before revealing that he was the villain all along, and making Aurora into our late-coming protagonist, forced to pit herself against this appealing but ultimately despicable man.

The movie implicitly makes a horrifying argument: "Good thing Jim fucked Aurora over so badly, because without her help, the whole ship would have been doomed!"

If that full-on confrontation between Jim and Aurora felt like a step too far, Passengers could have swung into existential horror instead of overt horror. In that version, the movie could have acknowledged Aurora’s decision for the brutal no-win scenario that it is, embracing the tragic complexity of why Aurora might choose to forgive and forget what Jim did, because the only alternative is spending a lifetime alone. Either way, the movie would have been honestly grappling with the extraordinarily ugly truth the entire narrative is built around.

Instead, the movie opts for the Hollywood ending. Eventually, a third passenger awakens: Gus Mancusco, a no-nonsense crewman played by Laurence Fishburne. When Aurora explains what Jim did to her, Gus is quick to sympathize with Jim, mansplaining that she really needs to think about how hard the whole thing has been from Jim’s perspective. And as the ship itself begins to deteriorate, requiring Jim and Aurora to call a tentative detente so they can work together to save it, the movie implicitly makes a horrifying argument: "It’s a good thing Jim fucked Aurora over so badly, because without her help, the whole ship would have been doomed!" Together, they fix the MacGuffin Machine, Jim almost floats off into the infinite blackness of space, and Aurora risks her own life to bring him back.

And in the end, Aurora doesn’t just risk her own life to save Jim—she gives it up to be with him. When Jim belatedly discovers a way she can reenter hibernation, she turns him down, opting to spend the rest of her life alongside Jim on the ship instead. We’re clearly supposed to see this as a beautiful, satisfying resolution to the thorny problem at the heart of the narrative: This time, Jim gives her a choice, and this time, Aurora chooses to spend the rest of her life alone with him. But accepting this as a redemptive arc requires the audience to accept an atonement that Jim never actually earns, which makes this purportedly feel-good ending reek of Stockholm syndrome.

By Gabriella Paiella

By Sophia Benoit

Even in this horrendous and compromised form, it probably goes without saying that a movie this risky and bizarre would never have been made with Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence in the lead roles—which is a shame, because a smaller, weirder version of this story with non-marquee names would probably avoid some of these compromises. Pratt is good, and Lawrence is great, but their collective charisma is at odds with the fundamental ickiness of the movie’s premise, because it makes it that much harder not to root for them to end up together. If you cast a couple of lower-wattage actors with the ability to embrace the movie’s creepier themes, you might have something.

Instead, we got Passengers , a movie too unpleasant to please mainstream audiences and too cowardly to embrace the darker themes that might have earned it a loyal group of defenders—which means, of course, that it will please no one. But it does offer a final lesson: Maybe, no matter who you cast, you can’t make an uncompromised $110 million Hollywood blockbuster after all.

Movies | “Passengers” movie review: Romantic sci-fi…

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Movies | “passengers” movie review: romantic sci-fi comedy or psychological horror flick.

* ½ stars | Sci-fi | PG-13 | 116 minutes

Note: This review contains mild spoilers and plot points.

For the first few minutes of “Passengers,” Jim Preston is as likable as they come.

As a mechanic on the Starship Avalon, Preston — played as a childlike everyman by Chris Pratt — has accidentally been roused from his hibernation en route to a new world, where his future seems as blank and promising as his character.

It’s a mystery for Preston as to why he’s the only one of 5,000 passengers to have woken up early — really, really early, as in, 90 years before his ship’s arrival on the distant Homestead II (Preston is from Denver, it says on his pod, but that fact never plays into his character).

Faced with a lifetime of solitude, Preston attempts to make do on the luxury space cruiser, which is basically an empty, live-action version of the Axiom from Pixar’s 2008 sci-fi masterpiece “WALL-E.” Director Morten Tyldum and screenwriter Jon Spaihts check the boxes on Preston’s slow realization of his fate, from comedic montages of Preston dealing with the ship’s imperfect technology to blatant foreshadowing of its ever-increasing malfunctions.

With a production design that wisely declines to improve on mid-to-late 20th century futurism (especially Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”) and some convenient monologues by Preston, “Passengers” hums along nicely for much of its first act.

“We’re all in this together,” a hologram announces to a room that’s empty except for Preston. It’s both an ironic joke and cutting commentary on technology’s role in alienating people in a crowded society, since Preston is basically living in a hyper-realized version of customer-service hell. His only companion, the droll android bartender Arthur (Michael Sheen, who comes off as a less manic Simon Pegg), appropriately acts as Preston’s echo chamber, encouraging him to do whatever he’s doing and camouflaging it as a two-way conversation. (Sound familiar?)

After nearly a year alone, Preston notices a beautiful woman in one of the hibernation capsules and sets out to learn everything about her. Aurora Lane (Jennifer Lawrence) is an ambitious writer with hours of video testimonials available for Pratt to watch. He does, seated next to her capsule, as he becomes increasingly desperate and obsessed with the idea of waking her up. He knows it’s wrong to doom her, but he’s unable to help himself.

What happens next deserves a violent tonal shift — from the film’s budding sci-fi romantic comedy overtures to psychological horror — that never arrives. Preston wakes Lane, lies to her about how it happened and then cautiously starts wooing her into a sexual relationship. She’s skeptical and smart but also arrogant, a stereotype of a snobby writer who claims to know the human condition but is prone to elitist generalizations.

Seeing these gorgeous, sparkly-eyed actors with palpable chemistry is diverting enough for awhile — and it’s meant to be. As an actor, Lawrence brings warmth and charisma to the screen as we’re presented with classic rom-com montages of her and Pratt dancing, laughing and otherwise loosening up in each others’ presence. It’s a desert-island fantasy come true.

Only when Lane learns the truth about how she woke up is there anything resembling a coherent viewpoint in the film. She screams that Preston has essentially murdered her, and she’s right: Preston has decided that what’s best for him is also what’s best for her (although not without some hand-wringing on his part). In these brief minutes, we see a glimpse of the more interesting movie this could have been, one that wrestles with the damage that men inflict on women when they make assumptions about what women need.

Instead, we swing fully back to Preston’s point of view as we’re caught up in a cascading series of sci-fi tropes and not-so-interesting revelations about the ship’s malfunctions. Laurence Fishburne shows up briefly and too late, playing a one-dimensional father figure and crew member who effectively absolves Pratt of his sins.

Cultural outrage is so common today that reading “Passengers” as a film by and for the male mindset feels simplistic. But truly, it’s not hard to see “Passengers” as fundamentally justifying Lane’s stalking and captivity. “Don’t worry if she’s mad at first, she’ll come around because you’re a good guy at heart,” it says unambiguously, over and over again.

Seen from the perspective of Lawrence’s character, “Passengers” is a terrifying story of emotional manipulation and eventual acquiescence to a numbing fate. The script attempts to tie things into a bow that offers a lesson for making the best of bad situations. But it rings as hollow as the shiny, cavernous spaces that provide much of the movie’s backdrop.

At best, “Passengers” is a pleasant, big-budget movie that unfolds in glib and cutesy ways despite its otherwise serious themes. At worst, it’s an argument that men can do whatever they want with the knowledge that things will always work out for them. Whether this message is intentional or not, Preston’s character is still rewarded for it. Lane identifies with, and ultimately declares her love for, her captor.

Even if you’re not bothered by the plot or politics, “Passengers” is a waste of two immensely likable actors’ talent — with Lawrence flexing the most acting muscle. There are a few things to applaud, from the non-franchise-ready story to sleek imagery and occasionally inspired set pieces (see the zero-gravity swimming pool). But it’s hard to shake the feeling that deep down, “Passengers” is making a disturbingly regressive statement amid the generic sci-fi spectacle. It’s not sure what kind of movie it is and that, above all, may be the thing that dooms it to a lifetime of rudderless drifting.

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Movie Review – Passengers (2016)

December 20, 2016 by Gary Collinson

Passengers , 2016.

Directed by Morten Tyldum. Starring Jennifer Lawrence, Chris Pratt, Michael Sheen, Laurence Fishburne and Andy Garcia.

A spacecraft traveling to a distant colony planet and transporting thousands of people has a malfunction in its sleep chambers. As a result, two passengers are awakened 90 years early.

Warning. Spoilers follow…

A high up executive at Sony should be revoked of all company privileges for failing to call Passengers “Muppets In Space.” That fear of being marooned in space wouldn’t be so bad if you had the company of Kermit and co, but to have Chris Pratt-a perennial Golden Retriever-and Jennifer Lawrence-an ever-growing bubble of sarcasm-one can imagine those 88 years would begin to feel stretched. Much like the spacecraft itself, it seems director Morten Tyldum (moving further and further from the brilliance of Headhunters ) chose the option of auto-pilot. His fingerprints are entirely absent, washed away by the monolithic personalities of its leads and the faint whiff of the monstrous shadow of studio intervention.

30 years into a 120 voyage, Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) finds himself awoken from hyper-sleep alone and confused on the Starship Avalon-a city sized ship travelling to distant colony planet “Homestead II.” For a year, his only company is cyborg bartender Arthur (a charming Michael Sheen) but his madness begins to grow-made visible by a ragged beard, designer disheveled hair and Hollywood alcoholism. Following a botched attempt at suicide, he stumbles upon the sleeping body of Aurora Lake (Jennifer Lawrence), a successful writer and all round good egg with whom he falls for. He briefly grapples with the idea of waking her up, questions the terrible decision for a moment, then does.

Once awake, Jim attempts to hide the fact that he saw a beautiful woman and realised the only way he can get into her pants is to inadvertently murder her, all while the ship begins to display a series of worrying technical malfunctions.

It’s difficult to look past a central concept hinging on such rampant sexism and the film does little to help. Lawrence, an adept actress, has to look confused, fuck, cry, be all a bit helpless, then fuck once more. Her independence only hinges on the whereabouts of her male counterpart, every decision she makes is in order to please, or aggravate a man. She is but Jim’s celestial fuck doll.

Those moments before she’s awoken, an elongated montage of Pratt living out his wildest fantasies of dancing against holograms, playing basketball on his own and eating fancy food with robots (all to the tune of that toxic remix of A Little Less Conversation), play as little more than teeth-grindingly irritating. Pratt’s charisma and charm-of which he has bags of-can only go so far before tipping into annoyance.

Yet, it’s as Jim wanders the ship drunk, alone, his fate suddenly clear, that the film is at its most confident. But again, like many a modern blockbuster, there is no real threat. It wanders aimlessly from set-piece to set piece without any real risk or conflict. There is little point in flashy sequences of gravity failure or moments of grand heroism if the ultimate fate of the characters is made clear early on.

Somewhere beneath the monolithic personalities of Pratt and Lawrence, beneath the endless montages of the two of them looking sporadically sad then exuberant as they have a dance battle in space or have sex in space or have breakfast in space, beneath the never-ending series of exterior shots of the ship rotating, there’s an interesting discussion on the ethical and moral dilemma of waking up a woman-thus ending her life a century early-in order to shag her. Keep an eye out for Andy Garcia in the year’s most ridiculous “Jesus Christ was that…” moment.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★

Thomas Harris

About Gary Collinson

Gary Collinson is a film, television and digital content producer and writer, founder of the pop culture website FlickeringMyth.com, and producer of the upcoming gothic horror feature film 'The Baby in the Basket'. He previously spent a decade teaching and lecturing in film and media, and is also the author of the book 'Holy Franchise, Batman! Bringing the Caped Crusader to the Screen'.

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Movie Review: Passengers (2016)

• Greg Eichelberger
• Movie Reviews
• 7 responses
• --> December 30, 2016

Passengers , the newest Sony Pictures (Village Roadshow) release, directed by Morten Tyldum (“ The Imitation Game ”), is a visually stunning outer space adventure with a very good cast (Jennifer Lawrence, Chris Pratt, Michael Sheen, Andy Garcia and Laurence Fishburne) that fails to lift off due to an earth-bound, cliché-ridden script. That last item can be blamed on Jon Spaihts (whose credits include the good, “ Doctor Strange ,” the bad, “ Prometheus ,” and the ugly, THIS feature).

Passengers falls in that crowded “Could Have, Should Have Been Better Than It Was” Department. It looks amazing, but then again, so does a wedding cake, but there are lot of empty calories there with little or no nutrition within.

The plot takes place in the distant future, when man has taken to colonizing other worlds and has developed spacecraft velocity near light speed. Aboard the Avalon on the way to Homestead II, an earth-like planet, colonist/mechanic Jim Preston (Pratt, “ Jurassic World ”) is awakened from his 120-year hyper-sleep when a small asteroid collides with the vessel. Stunned, he first believes it just the normal part of the trip’s conclusion, but a computer display informs him that there are still 90 years remaining in the journey.

He then meets what he thinks is another passenger, but it is Arthur, the robotic bartender (Sheen, “ Far from the Madding Crowd ”), with whom he shares his secret fear, frustration and loneliness, since he was the only passenger of the 5,000 or so aboard to have woken. Jim then discovers the hyperchamber of Aurora (Lawrence, “ X-Men: Apocalypse ”) and begins reading her complete history in the ship’s computer files (sort of stalking her, 21st century style). After a year’s solitary existence, he blabs to Arthur that he plans to sabotage her hyper-bay and bring her out of suspended animation. And although he knows this is wrong, the script insists upon it.

Once accomplished, this meet-in space-cute situation causes the two, of course, to fall in love (what’s new?). That is until the beans are spilled as to what REALLY happened. Before she can huff and puff too much, though, another human appears — in the form of Deck Chief Gus Mancuso (Fishburne, “ Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice ”) — who hangs around just long enough to tell them the luxury spaceliner has some serious issues.

No kidding.

When little problems like door jams, cafeteria snafus, elevator malfunctions and broken Roomba cleanup bots turn into major disasters (gravity control is lost, the power goes out and a fusion reactor reacts the wrong way), it’s the apparent end of the trip, the ship and our lovely leads. Since, however, Jim is a mechanic an Aurora is a, well, a writer, they get busy and try to discover just what’s wrong (the diagnostics are unavailable, so they have to figure it out by themselves). They find that the nuclear reactor is on the fritz, so like a typical mechanic and writer, they get to work in an attempt to solve the dilemma.

As previously written, Passengers is an amazing well-crafted visual experience. With the stellar Rodrigo Prieto (“ Argo ,” “Brokeback Mountain” and “Babel”) behind the camera, Guy Hendrix Dyas (“ Inception ”) in charge of production design, and art direction by John Collins (the first two “Hunger Games” films), the ship’s interior captures what such a vessel might actually look like, with 5-star restaurants, grand concourses, sophisticated voice-activated computer systems, modern pool and sports facilities and an unbelievable observation deck, among other amenities.

Meanwhile, the exterior photography is just as vast and beautiful (the science isn’t always perfect, though, as the Avalon gets dangerously close to a red giant star during the voyage, but no one seems to break a sweat over it).

Ironically, it’s when Lawrence is freed from her sleep pod that the film loses momentum. When Jim was alone, Passengers was fun as he ran around the vast craft, exploring, using various tools to try and wake the crew, banging on things, making a “collect” call to earth (that costs $6,000 and will take almost 50 years to hear back) and spilling his guts to Arthur, who finally tells him to enjoy what he’s got. Jim takes that advice, confiscates a luxury suite (he, it seems, is only a third class traveler), enjoys first class food and drink and even grows a beard that would make the cast of “Duck Dynasty” chartreuse with envy. The fun ends when Aurora arrives and we’re soon forced to endure several Hollywood-type sex scenes, including trying to make clumsy love in pressurized space suits. Thank goodness these scenes are short-lived. And while the leads squander their dramatic chances, Sheen commits grand larceny every time he is onscreen and makes the dull journey just a bit brighter . . . just a bit.

A cross between “ Gravity ,” “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “ The Martian ” and “ Moon ,” with a touch of “The Shining” for good measure, Passengers would have made a very interesting project if Jim were left to work things out on his own. But, then again, that probably would not have brought in as many viewers. And everyone knows, even in space you can still see the bottom line.

Tagged: journey , planet , ship , space , survival

I have been a movie fan for most of my life and a film critic since 1986 (my first published review was for "Platoon"). Since that time I have written for several news and entertainment publications in California, Utah and Idaho. Big fan of the Academy Awards - but wish it would go back to the five-minute dinner it was in May, 1929. A former member of the San Diego Film Critics Society and current co-host of "The Movie Guys," each Sunday afternoon on KOGO AM 600 in San Diego with Kevin Finnerty.

Movie Review: Despicable Me 3 (2017) Movie Review: Transformers: The Last Knight (2017) Movie Review: All Eyez On Me (2017) Movie Review: The Mummy (2017) Movie Review: Baywatch (2017) Movie Review: King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017) Movie Review: The Promise (2016)

'Movie Review: Passengers (2016)' have 7 comments

December 30, 2016 @ 11:48 am carpeltunnelvision

It’s so full of nonsensical holes The biggest I couldn’t get over was wearing his pleasure spacewalk suit, Jim would not have survived in the heat tube. He would have melted in an instant.

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December 30, 2016 @ 8:28 pm FireLich

That’s bad but worse is how can the system not have multiple failsafes in place to wake up the crew when catastrophic failures are occurring?

December 30, 2016 @ 12:11 pm PESH

This would have been great if Chris Pratt let his beard grow to ZZ Top lengths and just roamed the ship doing increasingly outrageous things.

December 30, 2016 @ 12:59 pm arm_hairs

It probably could have been better but it was still entertaining.

December 30, 2016 @ 2:13 pm Darryl

I liked it. Both leads are charismatic, the concept was original, and the FX looked great. Can’t ask much more from a popcorner than that.

December 30, 2016 @ 5:52 pm tostitos brand tortilla chips

Fuck that. I woulda waken up the entire ship.

December 30, 2016 @ 11:01 pm dirtyburd

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CineFiles Movie Reviews

Passengers (2016) Movie Review

The Avalon II is on a 120 year course to a second Earth: Homestead II. 5,000 passengers sleep in hibernation pods until four months of the voyage remain. Except, Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) wakes up 90 years too soon.

Passengers wants to be a lot of things. A Castaway story. A Titanic story. A 2001: A Space Odyssey story. What it fails to be is a more compelling version of any of these stories. The script reaches for themes that only amount to tired platitudes. The majority of the narrative is made up of bulky lead-ups to foregone conclusions or plot points that stop short of being something exciting.

The acting doesn’t help the course any. Pratt does a fine job on his own, although all that is required of him is a sad face held within a comical beard. Once he meets Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence), the only other human he has contact with, the wooden lack of chemistry is hard to swallow. This is probably the lowest point of Lawrence’s post- Winter’s Bone stardom. The saving grace of the film is Michael Sheen’s comic relief android bartender.

Passengers markets itself as a Kubrickian psychological thriller. The nods to Kubrick, direct as they are, are interesting. But the film itself does not come close to Kubrick levels of narrative and visual complexity.

Instead of complexity, effectively everything that happens on the Avalon II happens for plot convenience’s sake. Plot points are predicated on “chance,” making the entire film feel all the more fabricated. The existence of an entire character is based on the need for the screenwriter to further the plot. With every obvious logical pitfall of the plot, Passengers slips further and further away from an engaging experience.

Is it inappropriate to call Passengers farcically incompetent?

Passengers : D+

As always, thanks for reading!

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—Alex Brannan ( @TheAlexBrannan )

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Let’s Talk About the Ethics of Passengers ’ Big Twist

Spoilers for Passengers to follow .

The central twist — or, really, the premise — of  Passengers  depends on Chris Pratt’s character, Jim, waking up on a spaceship 90 years before it arrives at its destination, and then deciding to revive Jennifer Lawrence’s character, Aurora, so he’ll have some company. The film ultimately finds this gesture to be sorta romantic, at least once Jim stops lying to Aurora and admits that he’s the reason she’s awake. Critics have generally disagreed, calling Jim’s move  “terrifying,” “creepy,” “spineless,”  and, as Vulture’s David Edelstein put it,  just absurd .

So if Passengers is meant to present an ethical dilemma, it doesn’t do a very good job of it. But still, as the film spends much of the latter half of its run time trying to offer up excuses for Jim’s decision, it’s worth thinking about why, exactly, the film’s premise feels so icky. Do any of the film’s explanations for Jim’s actions really stick? Is there any good ethical framework for what he does?

Let’s start with the basics of the situation: After being woken up from his pod due to a mysterious technical malfunction, Jim spends a year alone on the luxury starliner Avalon , descending into total loneliness. He knows he is going to die on the ship, probably alone. He sees Aurora in her sleep pod, watches her preflight interviews, and decides that she is the one for him. After much hemming, hawing, and consulting with Michael Sheen’s robot bartender, he decides to wake her up. He immediately regrets this, so he lies to Aurora about what woke her up, and hey, what do you know, they end up falling in love.

Pretty much all of Jim’s actions are wrong in and of themselves, so if we’re going by any sort of deontological system of ethics — that is, rule-based and concerned with absolutes — things are looking pretty bad for Jim: By waking up Aurora, he’s effectively killing her. (The ship, as far as he’s aware, doesn’t possess the means to put anyone back to sleep.) Also, by neglecting to tell Aurora the truth, he’s lying to her in order to get her to sleep with him, which is bad. But really, the murder thing stands out. At one point, after learning the truth, Aurora shouts at Jim, “You murdered me!” Let’s not forget about that.

If we’re going to judge Jim by the consequences of his actions or consider any other mitigating factors, perhaps we have a little more leeway. In this, Passengers offers three main arguments in his favor. One: He and Aurora stop the ship from a major malfunction at the end of the movie and, in doing so, save the lives of the other 5,000 people onboard. Two: Laurence Fishburne, who briefly wakes up from his pod to offer some expository dialogue and then die, likens Jim’s actions to those of a drowning man who can’t help but pull other people down with him. Three: At the end of the movie, instead of going back into a newly discovered sleeping pod, Aurora decides to stay with Jim anyway. Their love was real!

The first argument in Jim’s favor reads a little like the infamous trolley problem, a favorite of subject introductory philosophy courses and also memes . More specifically, it’s like the variation of the problem that involves the main actor having to take action in order to avert a catastrophe — pushing a fat man in front of the trolley to stop it from killing a lot of other people. In this instance, Aurora is the sacrifice required to save the lives of all of those other people. And since Aurora would go down with the rest of the ship if she wasn’t woken up anyway, then the choice is fairly obvious. (Though, if you argue that killing someone is wrong no matter what, then Jim’s stuck.) But Jim makes the decision to wake up Aurora far before he knows about the problems with the ship, so it takes a lot of shaky logic to argue that he’s acting in good faith in the first instance. In the grand scheme of things, everything turns out okay, but that doesn’t mean it was done with good intentions.

Fishburne’s argument, that Jim wasn’t in control of his actions because he was acting like a drowning person, is more compelling. If Jim had lost control of his actions at the time when he decides to wake up Aurora, then we can’t justify him as a moral actor, and any discussion of whether his choice was right or wrong is moot. The problem with this is that Passengers doesn’t sell us on Jim’s despair. Sure, he has a big beard and is pretty sad about his life, but drowning in loneliness isn’t the same as drowning in waters. Jim knows what he’s doing is wrong, and yet he does it anyway.

Finally, we have the case of Aurora’s decision to forgive Jim after she falls in love with him. On the surface, this seems to clear everything up. If she isn’t bothered by the fact that her life was ruined, who are we to judge? Again, the flaws in this argument become apparent quickly. First, Aurora’s forgiveness is immaterial to the larger consequences of Jim’s actions. Falling in love with your murderer doesn’t stop them from being a murderer, just like rape doesn’t stop being rape if the victim later says they enjoyed it. Second, love in general is a pretty flimsy ethical justification for your actions. When Jim first considers waking up Aurora, he thinks that she’s his true love, something that’s lamp-shaded with Aurora’s fairy-tale name. But that’s not something he can know with certainty. If Aurora left a sticky note on her pod that said, “Please wake me up, but only if you look like Chris Pratt,” then we’d be talking. But as things stand, true love doesn’t exist, and it also doesn’t excuse murder, or entrapment, or really anything at all.

There are a few situations that might justify waking up Aurora from her sleeping pod — the hope you will prevent a clear and imminent catastrophe, say, or because you knew with absolute certainty that she wanted it to happen. And it’s possible to assume a sort of amoral situation in which she wakes up as an accident, or when Jim has no control over his decisions. Passengers doesn’t give us any of those situations. This doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a bad movie, but it certainly means that Jim makes a very bad decision.

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• jennifer lawrence
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Tuesday, December 20, 2016

'passengers' (2016) movie review.

Who else has watched this movie? This movie is the big hit of 2016, both actors performed very well in it I called my Cable Providers to ask when this movie is going to release on HBO or any other channel they said, sir, its not possible this movie is still on Cinema and cannot be released on TV soon.

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Passengers (2016)

On a routine journey through space to a new home, two passengers, sleeping in suspended animation, are awakened 90 years too early when their ship malfunctions. As Jim (Chris Pratt) and Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence) face living the rest of their lives on board, with every luxury they could ever ask for, they begin to fall for each other, unable to deny their intense attraction... until they discover the ship is in grave danger. With the lives of 5000 sleeping passengers at stake, only Jim and Aurora can save them all.

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The sinister theory about ‘finding nemo’ that’s leaving fans ‘shook’: ‘i’ve gotta call my therapist’.

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As if the depressing theory that bubbled to the surface years ago that Nemo was just a hallucination wasn’t bad enough, now this! 

As it turns out, the Barracuda wasn’t responsible for Marlin losing all his kids (bar Nemo). It was Coral, aka Nemo’s mom, all along. 

For those scratching their heads, here’s a quick refresher about the opening of the 2003 animation “Finding Nemo.” When Nemo was still an egg, Marlin lost his wife and all their other eggs in an attack from a fearsome barracuda.

A viral video has thrown many Disney fans into therapy after realizing that female clownfish eat their eggs. 

If reading this fan theory becomes too much to handle at any time, heed Dory’s advice: “Just keep swimming.”

“Do you know which animal does eat clownfish eggs?” 

“Here I am on my lunch break, thinking that if Nemo’s mom would have survived, he would have never gotten lost,” says  @makethatmagic , “And that his daddy was so irresponsible, come to find out. Barracudas don’t eat clownfish eggs. Nor do they eat clownfish.”

“But you know what animal does eat clownfish eggs? Clownfish!”

The TikToker, driven by curiosity, embarked on a quest for truth. She even discovered the character’s name, Coral, to “address her formally” in her findings.

“After Finding Nemo came out, marine biologists were like ‘nah, barracudas don’t eat clownfish eggs, but female clownfish will eat their eggs absolutely.”

As sad as this is, it’s true!

According to  Fanatasea Aquariums , “The male clownfish will tend to the eggs until they hatch. He will scope out any unviable or damaged; yes, he will eat those. Sometimes, all of the eggs will be eaten, especially during the parents’ first few attempts.”

Whoa, dude.

After this shocking realization, the video delves into the already uncovered fan theory that Nemo didn’t exist. Rather, Marlin was so grief-stricken he hallucinated Nemo, and the Reef just went along with it. 

“This is what sealed that. It might have been a hallucination for me. The Latin translation for Nemo is nobody. So the movie is Finding Nobody. 

“I cannot believe I gotta go to a meeting after that. I’m shook,” she ends her rant. 

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One fan cries: “Every day, this app finds a way to ruin my childhood.”

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“Ma’am, you’re called “make that magic”, but here you are, taking that magic away from my childhood,” one insisted.

This fan’s theory will haunt many: “So Marlin was in the ocean psych ward with Dory ’cause she was a little off, too! I’m shook!!!! Lol.”

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And then there was this, “The fact that clownfish can change genders sends me all the time because coral IS MARLON.”

Here’s hoping Disney Pixar studios will never confirm these theories! It’s a kid’s movie, after all. 

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The exact cause of the 73-year-old man’s death is under investigation. Authorities said he may have suffered a heart attack, though that hasn’t been confirmed. Based on witness accounts, the number of injuries and the airliner's sharp descent, experts point to the significant safety hazards that in-flight turbulence poses to airline passengers and crews.

While turbulence-related fatalities are quite rare, injuries have piled up over the years. Some meteorologists and aviation analysts note that reports of turbulence encounters also have been increasing and point to the potential impacts that climate change may have on flying conditions.

Most incidents of planes hitting bumpy air are minor, however, and airlines have made steady improvements to reduce accident rates from turbulence over time. Experts advise air travelers to stay vigilant, stressing the importance of wearing a seat belt whenever possible as a first line of protection.

WHAT IS TURBULENCE?

Turbulence is essentially unstable air that moves in a non-predictable fashion . Most people associate it with heavy storms. But the most dangerous type is clear-air turbulence, which often occurs with no visible warning in the sky ahead.

Clear-air turbulence happens most often in or near the high-altitude rivers of air called jet streams. The culprit is wind shear, which is when two huge air masses close to each other move at different speeds. If the difference in speed is big enough, the atmosphere can’t handle the strain, and it breaks into turbulent patterns like eddies in water.

“When you get strong wind shear near the jet stream, it can cause the air to (overturn). And that creates these chaotic motions in the air,” Thomas Guinn, chair of applied aviation sciences department at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida, explained.

HOW COMMON ARE TURBULENCE-RELATED INJURIES?

Tracking the total number of turbulence-related injuries around the world is difficult. But some individual countries publish national data.

More than one-third of all airline incidents in the United States from 2009 through 2018 were related to turbulence, and most of them resulted in one or more serious injuries but no damage to the plane, the National Transportation Safety Board reported .

Between 2009 and 2022, 163 people were injured seriously enough during turbulence events to require hospital treatment for at least two days, according to NTSB figures. Most of them were flight attendants, who are particularly at risk since they are more likely to be out of their seats during a flight.

Investigations are underway into what happened during Tuesday's Singapore Airlines flight. The carrier said the Boeing 777-300ER descended 6,000 feet (around 1,800 meters) in about three minutes after hitting severe turbulence over the Indian Ocean.

Preliminary casualty figures from the airport and a hospital in Bangkok, where the plane headed from London to Singapore landed in stormy weather, indicated that in addition to the one death, six or seven passengers were severely injured. Dozens of other travelers and crew members were reported to have suffered moderate or less serious injuries.

“It’s not uncommon to have turbulence encounters that cause minor injuries up to, say, a broken bone,” said Larry Cornman, a project scientist at the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Atmospheric Research who has long studied turbulence. “But fatalities are very, very rare — especially for large transport aircraft.”

According to Stuart Fox, director of flight and technical operations at the International Air Transport Association, the last clear air turbulence-related death reported from a major carrier took place in 1997. A few fatalities on smaller planes have been reported since, including a death on a private jet last year, Fox said.

Now-standardized safety procedures have significantly helped prevent more cases of serious injuries over the years. Fox noted. They include reviewing weather forecasts, having pilots report when they encounter turbulence and suspending cabin service when planes hit rough air.

CAN PILOTS AVOID TURBULENCE?

Pilots use a variety of methods to avoid turbulence, including using a weather radar display. Sometimes they can simply see and fly around thunderstorms.

But clear-air turbulence “is altogether another animal,” according to Doug Moss, a former airline pilot and safety consultant. It can be devastating, he said, “because the time before the incident can be very calm, and people are caught off-guard.”

Air traffic controllers will warn pilots after another plane runs into clear-air turbulence, Moss said. Many pilots also look at the upper-level jet streams along their route for signs of wind shear, then plan to fly above, below or around those areas, he said.

Modern planes are strong enough to handle just about any turbulence. Cabin areas such as overhead bins may receive cosmetic damage, “but these don’t impact the structural integrity of the planes,” Moss said.

IS CLIMATE CHANGE CAUSING TURBULENCE TO INCREASE?

Some scientists note that reports of turbulence encounters are on the rise. There are a number of possible explanations for that, but several researchers have pointed to potential climate impacts.

Guinn, of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, explains that some predict climate change could alter the jet stream and up the wind shear, which would consequently drive up turbulence in the air.

In a statement Tuesday, Paul Williams, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Reading in England, said there was “strong evidence that turbulence is increasing because of climate change.”

Williams said his research team recently discovered that severe clear-air turbulence in the North Atlantic has increased by 55% since 1979, for example. The team's latest projections signal that severe turbulence in the jet streams could double or triple in the coming decades if global conditions continue as expected, he said.

Still, others say other factors could also be at play. Cornman notes that there could be a rise in overall air traffic — which may increase turbulence encounters as the number of flight tracks, including those in areas of more turbulence, goes up.

HOW CAN TRAVELERS STAY SAFE?

In short, buckle up. Turbulence can be tricky to predict, but experts stress that the first line of defense in the air is keeping the seat belt fastened, whenever possible.

"Planes are generally built to withstand turbulence," Guinn said, noting that passengers not wearing their seat belts is a large source of injuries from in-flight turbulence. While no precaution is foolproof, wearing a seat belt greatly increases an individual's chances of avoiding serious injuries, he said.

“Wear your seat belt," Guinn said. he stressed. “That’s just a really quick fix to prevent injury.”

Chalida Ekvitthayavechnukul in Bangkok and David Koenig in Dallas contributed reporting.

This story was first published on May 21, 2024. It was updated on May 22, 2024 to make clear that Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University professor Thomas Guinn intended to say that strong wind shear causes air to overturn, not overflow.