Passengers

I don't think I've done a meta-review before, but I need to rant about the press coverage that Passengers is getting, and dammit I have a blog.

This will involve spoilers. Lots of them.

Gizmodo's review of Passengers, for reference.

The plot point at the center of the complaint in that review (and others) is that Chris Pratt's character Jim wakes up Jennifer Lawrence's character Aurora. As the review says, this is a terrible thing to do, and robs her of the future she had planned for herself, and that's the entire point of the movie. It's not like the movie tiptoes around it.

Gizmodo's review says "Sometimes you see it, others you don’t. It gets a big moment, then it’s forgotten." No. No one ever forgets it. The romance plot, before Aurora finds out, is littered with Jim's guilt. They don't talk about it during the action sequences, because that's really not the time for it, but everything else revolves around his decision to wake her up and what that means.

It's possible that the author of the review simply wasn't paying attention - in the next paragraph, he asks "Why are these people taking this trip?" and "Why is anti-gravity swimming even available?" The first of those is addressed, though not in great depth, and the second - it's not, except when gravity fails due to critical system shutdowns, which is, you know, the driving plot of the movie.

Passengers is good sci-fi. It takes human characters, puts them in difficult situations, and imagines what they would do. Humans are social creatures, and while Jim's decision is clearly unethical, it is understandable, and asking the audience to think about that is the point.

The Gizmodo review further says "Waking Aurora up is tantamount to murder." It's true that Aurora says the same thing, but she changes her mind later, and the reviewer doesn't seem to understand that, or why. We're all going to die. Your parents sentenced you to death at the moment of your birth. How we live our lives is what matters, and that's the other main point of the film. It's not like they were trying to hide that either - it's flatly stated more than once, by more than one character (which is impressive, since there are only four characters with appreciable speaking lines). I understand disliking the ending. I can think of a few other ways they could have handled the situation that might have allowed them a different outcome - but I also understand the choice the characters made, to live the life they had in front of them because it was a good enough life to live.

For the objection that Jim's a manipulative asshole - sure. He's also smart, charming, good looking, funny. I've seen people make worse choices. I do wish the filmmakers had had the vision and balls to pull a Clue and film alternate endings. That would have been spectacular.

Lastly, I'm shocked and appalled that none of the reviews I've read have pointed out the obvious - Jennifer Lawrence's character is named Aurora Lane. And she's a reporter. Aurora for Sleeping Beauty, and Lane for Lois Lane. It's so completely obviously referential. Jim even wakes her up from a glass coffin nonconsensually (in the Disney sense, not the fairy tale sense). Then they reverse the glass coffin scene at the end for closure. The writers clearly knew what they were doing here, and I'm ashamed of the movie critics who didn't get it.

Performance: 4/5
Plot: 3.5/5
Production: 5/5
Overall: 3.5/5
Bechdel: Fail (F - I'm not counting holograms)
Mako Mori: Pass - and this is where I have a problem with some other reviewers. Aurora did have her own motivations that didn't involve Jim, and that's the point.

What are these?

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

There are mild spoilers in this review.

I'm going to start my review with a two-part statement that may cause confusion and outrage: I'm a huge Star Wars fan, and none of the movies are very good. The original Star Wars has an important and hallowed place in cinema history, and it's not a very good movie. Empire, the golden child of Star Wars fans, is really pretty decent, but it has its problems. I have a soft spot for Jedi, but Ewoks, man. Ewoks. Force Awakens was enjoyable, but not really good cinema. Also, there were prequels. What I'm saying here is that Star Wars does not have a track record of making good movies.

There is something about Star Wars, though, that makes it great despite this. The grandeur, the wonder, the scope, the imagination, the Force, the bigness and smallness of it - and of course the music - add up to a cultural phenomenon that I deeply love. I have similar thoughts about Potter, but that's a different topic.

All of this introduction exists to give background and context to my one-sentence review of Rogue One: it's a pretty decent Star Wars-themed action film. It's not great cinema, but I was entertained.

As a Star Wars fan, I appreciated the many references to other Star Wars properties, mostly Episode IV. The digital effects that allowed them to insert characters that first hit the screen almost forty years ago without jarring the audience - impressive.

Of course, as a Star Wars fan, I knew how this film needed to end. Rather, I knew the state that the setting needed to be at the end of the film, and therefore the ending was, by definition, predictable. The journey of getting there was fairly well done, though, and I appreciate that the studio had the guts to make a movie with that ending. I suspect that the commentary I'm seeing comparing it to Empire is based in part on similarity in arc.

I do have a number of problems with the film. I was never convinced by the motivations of the main characters. The actors emoted well, and the writers tried very hard to give them depth, but most of it rang hollow to me. The pacing was off; I suspect tightening up the edit by five or ten minutes would have helped a lot. The movie was very dark; I don't mean tonally, I mean it wasn't well-lit, which often made it hard to see what was going on. And, large parts of the plot (mostly everything to do with Saw Gerrera) were forced/borderline nonsensical.

Despite that, I enjoyed this movie. K-2SO (voiced by Alan Tudyk) was great, as was Donnie Yen's blind monk. The space battles were fantastically good. The ground combats were also well done, and all of it felt like Star Wars. There's a large extent to which not sucking is a major achievement for a Star Wars movie, and this one passed that test.

Speaking of tests, it passes Bechdel but fails Mako Mori - arguably. The test calls for a female character whose arc is not about supporting a man's story. Jyn's arc is all about her father, from start to finish - but his arc is about her, always, down to the project name. It might be a gray area.

I'd have appreciated more female background characters (though there were some), but it was nice that there wasn't a forced romance between the male and female leads.

Performance: 3/5
Plot: 3/5
Production: 5/5
Overall: 3.5/5
Bechdel: Pass (B)
Mako Mori: Fail

What are these?