Anne Hathaway headlines the film as Claire, a young grief counselor who has been assigned to talk with the few survivors of a recent airplane crash. Most of the victims are understandably shaken and therefore reluctant to enter counseling, and eventually they start to -- ba-DUM -- disappear! Could it be that they just aren't willing to go through with therapy? Or could it be... something else? Something... not of this world? Take one guess.
One of the crash survivors -- the most handsome survivor, no less -- is named Eric (Patrick Wilson), and while he insists he doesn't need therapy, he does insist on becoming a part of Claire's personal life. Something is amiss about this guy -- he's just a little too peppy for a crash survivor, a little too put-together for a dude who just emerged from extreme trauma. That's because Eric suffers from the curious movie ailment of the Mysterious Stranger: He is enigmatic, charming, and mildly creepy. Of course, in Movie-opolis, that means our heroine must be inexorably drawn to him. And so it goes -- Claire and Eric meet several times, he acts creepy, and she takes it like catnip. Eventually there is a love scene, even though so much of the characters' interactions feels like exposition without a payoff that any possible connection we might have to their relationship is lost.
There is a lot going on in this movie, none of which is especially compelling or original. The supporting characters each fill a certain formulaic niche. David Morse pops up as a vaguely threatening airline employee... could the airline have sinister intensions? Andre Braugher shows up as a wizened mentor whom Claire turns to whenever the screenplay requires her to update the audience on the hazy plot mysteries. And Dianne Wiest has an odd role as Claire's spinster neighbor, who folds her laundry and generally observes her every move. She is kind, obsessive, and, yes, mysterious.
The first half of Passengers is so monotonous that one could easily fail to identify it as a thriller. Predictably, the revelations fly in the second half -- more passengers disappear, familiar characters appear to turn sinister, and Claire becomes increasingly unhinged as her world appears to break apart from under her. Obviously there is a secret that the film works hard to unlock, and for a plot twist so seemingly obvious, the screenplay spells it out without making the viewer do any work whatsoever. But within that twist lies the film's unexpected humanity. There is a tenderness and good nature to the film's secret (sorry -- can't give it away) that separates it from other slam-bang spooky thrillers, and which represents the film's most interesting idea. Shame that said idea is neither early enough to redeem the film's doomed snail pace, nor earth-shattering enough to reshape the way we've received all that came before it.
Rodrigo Garcia, graceful indie director of woman-centered films like Nine Lives and Things You Can Tell Just By Looking At Her, takes a stab at the moody psycho-thriller subgenre with this film. Garcia is a major talent, but not the type of director one would expect to be handling this material. He struggles not so much with the transition to a new genre, but with a screenplay with ideas that get lost in the shuffle of standard 'mysterious plot' filler. Passengers is a film that gets richer and more graceful as it goes along, and Garcia is the right director for its subtler, more sensitive elements, but the movie's thriller elements are so murky and tepid that the director can bring nothing to the table other than a workmanlike adherence to standard thriller conventions.
The DVD includes deleted scenes, commentary track, and two making of featurettes.
Now boarding, gate 3.
