Passengers

Morten Tyldum’s last film The Imitation Game was a serious Oscars contender at the time, which makes it all the more weirder that his latest film Passengers seems to be stuck in Limbo - with not enough action and excitement to be a popcorn thriller and too-poor a story to be a quality drama-romance.

The colonial seeding-ship Avalon is transporting 5,000 colonists to the planet Homestead II, a 120 year journey that has the entire crew in long-term hibernation pods. After some strange happenings on the ship, two passengers are awoken 90 years early, seemingly due to pod-malfunctions. Mechanical engineer Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) and writer Aurora Lane (Jennifer Lawrence) find themselves alone on the ship, their only other mildly charismatic company the android bartender Arthur (Michael Sheen) and no way to go back to sleep in the Hibernation pods.

Passengers does seem genuinely confused about what it should be. Its opening act starts off as you might expect a classic sci-fi blockbuster of yesteryear to begin, establishing the confines of the location and building a sense of isolation. It uses montages effectively and manages to keep the foot on the pedal, but after a key decision made by one of the characters - something pretty unethical that should have help contour their character development, but is shrugged off by the film soon after - Passengers starts to go downhill fast. It becomes surprisingly slow and bland, and beyond the first act there are no real twists and turns in the story as you might have expected had you seen the trailer. The agonisingly average story just can’t deliver on the hype Passengers tried to build through an intense marketing campaign.

With obvious homages to several Kubrick films and a smattering of others, Passengers doesn’t really have a personality of its own, and whilst Pratt and Lawrence should be able to deliver oodles of chemistry on-screen, the second-rate screenplay drags their performances down immensely. There were also a handful of blatant overacting moments from Lawrence, whilst Pratt is much more timid (see: boring) than in his usual roles, although you can tell that they’re trying to do their best with the mediocre material they’re given. Indeed, the most frustrating thing about Passengers is that you can tell there could be a really dynamic, well-acted romance in there somewhere - a sort of Lost in Translation in Space - if it just stopped trying to add in all the hallmark sci-fi elements that it doesn’t have the complexity to pull off.

If Passengers does have one redeeming feature, it would be its visual composition. As glossy and beautiful as you would expect a $110 million film to look, it manages to keep a leash on its many CGI elements which blend in near-seamlessly with the live action work. Whilst it doesn’t have a unique style, it does at least manage to suspend disbelief when it comes to location, a challenge that many far higher profile films often fail. The helical design of the Avalon ship is surprisingly cool and is integrated into the action in a reasonably satisfying way. Though ultimately these attributes can’t undo the damage of a poorly written story - or even justify going to see the film - they were at least present when the rest of film collapsed on itself.

Passengers has an interesting enough premise, and could have been a lot better even with subtle tweaks to the order of the story, but ultimately it's let down by an uninspiring screenplay and dull-as-dishwater characters.

The Imitation Game

"Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine."

Alan Turing was a remarkable man that made a huge difference to the world, but was persecuted nevertheless. His work in breaking the German Enigma code had a profound impact on the outcome of World War II, yet he encountered extreme prejudice for being a homosexual. Now his story has been transformed into a film in Morten Tyldum's The Imitation Game.

At the height of World War II, Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch), a mathematician and avid crossword enthusiast joins a team of cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park to decipher the German Enigma code, a encoding system that is used on every German message, but which changes daily. Turing immediately gets off on the wrong foot with both his superior, Commander Denniston (Charles Dance) and his colleagues, particularly Hugh Alexander (Matthew Goode).

Whilst they begin originally by attempting to decipher each day's settings by hand, Turing soon designs a machine to calculate the settings quickly and automatically, taking inspiration from a similar Polish machine. Turing fails to get support from either Denniston or his co-workers, but after he sends a letter to Churchill, the project is soon moved forward, with Turing in charge. He develops a crossword designed to find potential candidates for the project, and it is through this that Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley) joins the project. The team continue to develop the machine, with the time pressures of a devastating war looming over them, all the while, Turing is hiding the fact that he is a homosexual, which was illegal at the time.

Mixing together three different periods of Turing's life; his childhood, his work with Enigma, and the period after the war, Morten Tyldum's English debut attempts to summarise the importance of Turing's work in a two hour film. A feat which it manages exceptionally well, albeit whilst following the rules of a typical biopic. Although its attempts to draw importance out of linkages between the different eras of his life can sometimes feel a bit forced, The Imitation Game is strong in structure and incredibly thought-provoking in content. Alan Turing's life has been depicted before, including documentaries, television movies and even a musical, but this film will hopefully draw more attention to the man. The only complaint I have about it, is that his persecution and death are somewhat downplayed and simply presented in what I like to call 'wrap-up text' towards the end of the film. For the sake of an additional twenty minutes, the film could have been more successful in acknowledging the prejudiced state of the world at that time.

In by far his best performance yet, Benedict Cumberbatch is phenomenal as Turing. His ability to transform himself into this unusual man, likely to have been autistic, is quite astounding. He even brings a hint of charm to the role as he delivers insulting but hilarious remarks. He's the one that makes this a fantastic film. Starring next to him, Knightly is also very good as Joan and rarely can anyone fault the stern acting ability of Charles Dance. Goode rounds off the cast as the typically dashing Hugh, and whilst he seems to spent most of his screen time in the corner, shrugging at Turing's unusual decisions, Mark Strong is fine as MI6 Major General Menzies.

The Imitation Game follows the likes of The Kings Speech and Lincoln as one of the great biographical films of recent years. It's skillfully constructed by Tyldum and fantastically acted by Benedict Cumberbatch, who'll likely receive an Oscar nomination for his performance.