Chris Pratt reveals the unusual place he found Jennifer Lawrence asleep

But, honestly, as the movie fumbles over logic (for instance, there’s literally no one on board who knows how to pilot this ship?) while attempting to get its stars into kissing position, it becomes hard to parse its messages. What do you do?

For one thing, we’re supposed to believe that a spacecraft the size of a small town has only a single cyborg? Or maybe it was one of the many producers and studio executives who authorized a massive budget and huge paydays for stars Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt, and thus needed to make sure the movie appealed to the widest possible audience. The down-to-earth Pratt is ever watchable, although his chemistry with Lawrence is lacking and she’s not given an bad lot to do.

Everyone on board the ship is put into hypersleep, but Lawrence and Pratt’s characters wake 90 years too early. But then he sees Aurora.

Enter Aurora-yes, like Sleeping Beauty. After presumably weeks of reading up her file and watching videos she did before the trip, he decides to wake her up so he has a companion. Jim and Aurora are forced to unravel the mystery behind the malfunction as the ship teeters on the brink of collapse, with the lives of thousands of passengers in jeopardy.

The critical mission of Passengers is love, ladies and gentlemen, between Chris Pratt’s lonely engineer Jim and Jennifer Lawrence’s spirited journalist Aurora. Much of the second act plays like a love story out of a B-grade rom-com.

While every plot move the film makes is defensible in theory, so many of them, like the Jim/Aurora attraction, are so obvious it’s frustrating to have to wait long stretches of time for them to happen. As the ship begins to malfunction in myriad ways, Jim’s big secret looms over their romance, threatening to ruin everything he’s so carefully constructed. But the problems go way beyond the story.

Perhaps inspired by “The Shining’s” unflappable barman Lloyd, and aided by a gliding movement rig worked up by the special effects team coordinated by Daniel Sudick, Sheen’s Arthur hits the exact half human/half machine sweet spot essential for android work. Spaihts’ dialogue could use some work too. When asked about shooting “X-Men: Apocalypse” in a 2015 interview, Lawrence said it would be her “last one”.

Director Morten Tyldum, Oscar-nominated for “The Imitation Game“, can’t muster up any sense of wonder, even with the galaxy as his backdrop. So after shooting all the hoops he can, floating through the cosmos attached to a tether and drinking his weight in coffee (his low-level ship pass won’t allow him frothy drink upgrades; in space no one can hear your cries for a Frappuccino), he becomes fixated on a passenger named Aurora Lane (Jennifer Lawrence).

Cinemablend talked to Lawrence and Pratt on the movie’s press day in Los Angeles, where Lawrence shared that someone told her the film “looks good, but you gave away the twist in the trailer!” They’re two of the funniest people. Instead it suggests that consent doesn’t matter, codes stalking as romance, and lionizes its male lead while turning its female character into a love-sick damsel. “I like taking my place in that pantheon”. If you want smart sci-fi this holiday season, go see Arrival.