Stop your grinning and drop your linen! Sony Pictures has premiered two new stills for Morten Tyldum’s marquee sci-fi pic Passengers.
Complimenting the unveiling of last week’s debut trailer, these images find lead stars Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence exploring the bowels of the Starship Avalon, a space vessel bound for a far-flung planet known as Homestead II. It’s on this journey that Pratt and Lawrence, along with the other 5,000 odd passengers on board, are placed under cryogenic sleep in true science fiction fashion, but a technical malfunction jolts them awake only 30 years into a 120-year journey.
Scrambling for a way to fix their problem, Jim Preston (Pratt) and Aurora Dunn (Lawrence) are left with little choice but to science the shit out of the situation, confronting some truly unsettling questions as they go. For instance, are they able to engineer some workaround to ensure their safe passage? What caused their crude awakening in the first place? And, perhaps more importantly, is there a bigger conspiracy at play?
Toss in shots of Laurence Fishburne’s high-ranking figure along with Michael Sheen’s erratic, submissive synthetic and you have all the necessary ingredients for an intriguing, spacefaring thriller. At least, that’s the promise. Time will tell whether that plot twist is really as shocking as Tuesday’s trailer would have you believe.
Come December 21, Passengers will be opening against strong competition from Justin Kurzel’s Assassin’s Creed, Patriots Day and the starry animation known as Sing. A tall order, of course, though Pratt and Lawrence’s inclusion ensures Morten Tyldum’s sci-fi has star power in spades, but will the final product be able to exceed those lofty expectations?