In recent years, there has been a new wave of science fiction prestige films hitting the theaters. These films are designed to focus on both exploring science fiction concepts and the human condition. They are not only audience friendly, they end up usually being award friendly as well. Films like Gravity, Interstellar, The Martian, and Arrival all fit in with this descriptor and hit their own marks successfully. Despite its intentions on being apart of this wave, Passengers is starts off with a lot of potential but quickly ends up being a subpar Nicolas Sparks movie that takes place in space.



Traveling through space to a new home on a new world, two passengers, sleeping in suspended animation, wake up 90 years too early when their ship mysteriously malfunctions. The two passengers, played by Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence, discover that there is more to both their problems and the ship’s problems than meets the eye.



Passengers as a whole is a movie that should work. You have two of the world’s hottest stars; a script written by Jon Spaihts (Doctor Strange, Prometheus) that was on the Black List, and that is directed by Morten Tyldum, who is fresh off of an Oscar nomination for The Imitation Game . With all of this talent and money (the film has an alleged budget of $120 million dollars), you would imagine that the resulting film would be at least good. With the exception of some enjoyable visuals, Passengers is a film that is aggressively mediocre.