Passengers
Unfortunately, the film-makers weren't as willing as their characters to make hard choices.
This is what I've been playing and watching in the last seven days...
MOVIES
Passengers
Movie summary: A malfunction in a sleeping pod on a spacecraft traveling to a distant colony planet wakes one passenger 90 years early. (IMDb)
I knew Passengers had a sketchy reputation (to say the least) before I watched and wondered for the longest time when the 'bad stuff' would happen, as everything seemed fine even three-quarters of the way through the film. And that's when it shits the bed.
There's no way to explain what's bad without spoiling the story, so skip down to the paragraph with the score if you'd rather go in blind. Right, here goes...
Chris Pratt's character, Jim, is woken up early on a 120-year journey through space to a colony world, becomes near suicidal and wakes up an attractive woman - Jennifer Lawrence's Aurora - out of desperation for some company, with her eventually falling for him.
The shit hits the fan when the ship's robotic bartender, Arthur (Michael Sheen), lets slip that Aurora's wakening wasn't an accident and leading to her anger at Jim driving her to the point of almost killing him in revenge for effectively murdering her, by ending the life she'd planned for herself.
All of this is fine, and even when a crew member wakes up and enlists them in helping to save the ship from being destroyed, it all still makes sense with the pair having no choice but to work together to avoid their own deaths.
The problem is that this crisis is apparently all it takes for Aurora to fall back in love with Jim and, even after the crisis is solved and he has figured out a way to put her back in hibernation, she refuses and decides to stay awake with him.
I'm sorry, what?
I don't know the real reason why the ending is the way it is, but I feel it has to be one or more of Pratt and/or Lawrence's demand for a happy ending, or a studio exec, or a test audience, or someone else who doesn't understand people at all, resulting in the blandest, beigest, safest and most unsatisfying finale that could've been made.
I'm not going to go into the number of different ways that the ending could've been done better (I can think of at least three off the top of my head), but having the female lead who was absolutely correct in being borderline-murderously furious fall back in love with the guy who 'ended' her life and bedded her under false pretences just sends all kinds of wrong messages.
All of that makes it really hard to recommend Passengers, which is a perfectly solid sci-fi movie up to the two-thirds/three-quarters point when the 'must have a happy ending' switch was flicked and undoes the entire film.
Even then, that first chunk of the film could've been improved by telling the story from Aurora's perspective and letting the revelation of why she woke up be as big a shock to the audience as it was to her. There's some major tension that could've really added something special, even if that would've still been undone by the ending.
The majority of Passengers is fine, even if it's nothing special. Unfortunately, there's just no getting away from that ending which feels like the least dramatically-satisfying way it was possible to end the story being told. [4/10]
Still an excellent movie with a brilliant cast that should already have a sequel or two thanks to how damned good it is. A proper 'comfort food' type of film.
Okay, it's not the greatest film ever, but it's still a perfectly solid sci-fi outing for such a small cast and it looks absolutely incredible too. It just scratches a particular sci-fi itch for me.
GAMES
Jurassic World Evolution
Game summary: Bioengineer dinosaurs that think, feel and react intelligently to the world around them and face threats posed by espionage, breakouts and devastating tropical storms in an uncertain world where life always finds a way. (Steam)
Feels very connected to the Jurassic World movie series, even if they couldn't get most of the cast back to voice their characters, but I'm not sure a park-management simulator will appeal all that much to fans of what is essentially a dinosaur-based action film series anyway.
The game really doesn't wait around dumping huge amounts of information on the player and I have to admit to feeling a little lost at times, wondering if I'd missed something that had flashed up on-screen and disappeared while the game had me dealing with something else at the same time that needed my immediate attention.
I'm not really feeling it at the moment, but will keep going for now and hope building up a familiarity with that game's systems will make the experience 'click' at some point.
Yakuza 0
Game summary: Fight like hell through Tokyo and Osaka as junior yakuza Kiryu and Majima. (Steam)
A very poor first impression thanks to a camera that you that constantly wants to swing back to behind your character and being unable to stop this happening, resulting in this being the first ever third-person game to give me motion sickness.
It also doesn't tell you how to save and there's no autosave either, meaning I lost my first hour of play and had to re-do it. Well, I say first hour of play but it felt more like 75% cut-scenes and conversations, 25% actually controlling my character.
Also, you can't cancel out of the mini games or restart them without completely exiting the game, which is also pretty crap when it barely explains what you have to to do in said mini games and so I screwed up pretty regularly as I tried to figure out what the game wanted practically from scratch.
Just a masterclass in how to design a game that's off-putting for a new player so far...
TV
Fallout, Season 1
Episode 3, "The Head"
"Maybe" by the Ink Spots being used? I don't if I missed it in an earlier episode, but holy hells did that give me major flashbacks to the opening of the first Fallout game in the best way possible.
Otherwise, it was another pretty decent episode and I loved the design of the Gulper creature with human fingers instead of teeth as the focal point of this outing, but things are very much feeling like this was one long story chopped up into parts rather than individual episodes building towards something.
While there's nothing intrinsically wrong with either approach in my opinion, it does mean that each episode does feel a little insubstantial and I'm going to predict now that the first episode will remain my favourite by the time the season's over, solely because it feels a little more 'complete' than either episode since.
Episode 4, "The Ghouls"
It was so good to finally see Walton Goggins' Ghoul get laid low for once as that character was starting to grow a bit boring for me, and I like that Ella Purnell's Lucy is starting to look a bit more like a player character from the game's and acquiring gear to replace her Vault-Dweller's outfit.
And Matt bloody Berry was Snip Snip the robot, which was a pleasant surprise, and certainly made its disturbing intentions more entertaining than they really should've been. I'm also really intrigued by what happened in Vault 32, where they all seem to have killed each other or themselves.
Overall, the most enjoyable episode since the first.
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