Verbal Diorama

2016's Passengers, starring Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence and Hollywood heartthrob Chris Pratt should have had an easy journey to sci-fi greatness. Its script was championed in the 2007 Hollywood Black List, it enticed an Oscar nominated director and Sony believed in it so much they upped the budget to $120 million. There was a lot riding on the success of the Starship Avalon's 120-year voyage to Homestead II.The problem is..... it's meant to be romantic, but just ends up feeling, well, really creepy.Passengers is a movie with a lot of promise. It wants to be a cautionary tale on our reliance on technology and trusting of big corporations, the social and class divide between the rich and the poor, for us to ask questions about moral quandaries, to empathise with a character’s isolation and loneliness and the broader implications of artificial intelligence but it kinda takes all these interesting and rich discussions and bookends them with “yeah, but they’re both really hot” and never really satisfactorily an