My expectations for this were muted at best. So it was to my surprise to walk out of Passengers not hating it like a lot of my colleagues did. I'm just indifferent to it. This movie is pretty straightforward and doesn't offer up any surprises which both hurts the film and keeps it in a safe Hollywood place. Director Morten Tyldum was a director I thought had a promising career with the excellent Headhunters. I guess I was wrong.

Awakening too early on a spaceship headed to Homestead II, a new colony planet, Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) and Aurora Lane (Jennifer Lawrence) try to find a way back into hibernation with still 90 years left on their journey. As they deal with anomalies in the ship, they gradually fall in love with each other.

So since the trailer made it seem like there's a big plot twist in this I changed the plot summary to reflect what really happens. And sorry, there is no big plot twist. As I said earlier, Tyldum was a director I was eager to see what he would do next and so far, all the energy and style that was presented in Headhunters is gone. Following up his much acclaimed (to me it's weak Oscar bait) The Imitation Game, he goes for the big Hollywood sci-fi romantic blockbuster, but doesn't do anything visually new with it. This seems like this could've been directed by an anonymous TV director as the look of the film has a TV movie quality despite a few good looking sets and the best part of the movie wherein gravity loss occurs (you've seen it in the trailers) with the gravity bubbles that Jennifer Lawrence is trapped in.

My colleagues and I were talking about the script and how it takes a strong premise and does nothing with it. It's true this could've gone in many interesting directions and instead it plays it safe. When one of my colleagues mentioned how this was on The Black List, I told her not to rely on that as most (not all) are average at best. And this is a script that has been in development hell for a while. It's reputation grew about how good it was with Keanu Reeves being attached to it for years with both Emily Blunt and Rachael McAdams being attached as his co-star for great periods of time. Notable directors came and went. But, I remember seeing that once Keanu left, he talked about why this had trouble getting made and part of that was the budget was too big and this was an original idea. Yes, it's true that to get big budget original films off the ground is hard unless your Christopher Nolan, but this seems Hollywood as hell. I mean this is coming out at Christmas in 3D for a reason (my screening was 2D). With a $120 million dollar price tag I can tell you that a good chunk of that went to paying the actors as this could've easily been a fifty to eighty million dollar film easily.

Speaking of Chris and Jennifer do their jobs in selling the characters that are already pretty likable. When Jim does the "questionable" thing in the film, it's not like you hate him for it as he's a good person and you completely understand where he's coming from. There's no complexity or layers to these characters. Jim is an engineer and you can already figure out how that'll come into play later on. He's the handsome everyday guy who just wants to build houses and make people happy. Aurora is the rich New York writer with lots of friends and is the manic pixie girl without the hipster tendencies. The perfect girl who can make you cry cause she's that good at writing. It's by the numbers. Laurence Fishburne pops up to provide exposition and his last lines are really, really bad. It made me scratch my head on why he would show up for an extended cameo and to top it off his character had eighty-five different illnesses for some reason. Also, Andy Garica pops up for a brief moment which leads me to believe I guess he had a bigger role than originally intended. Probably not bigger that what's seen but still he has no lines. Michael Sheen plays Arthur the android bartender who's performance is serviceable for a thankless role.

Serviceable seems to be a recurring theme in this film as that's what it is. You can do much, much worse this holiday season with the likes of the truly awful Collateral Beauty that has sociopathic characters you're supposed to root for, or Sing which has the most bizarre subplots I've ever seen in a kid's movie that's essentially The X Factor with walking, talking animals. But, Passengers is a rental. Something you can throw on in the background or a date night with your significant other at the house. I feel as if I'm not gonna hate this as much as my colleagues, as this is just as middle of the road, plain Hollywood you can get without it being too harmless