When the closing credits rolled the first time I saw this, I was stuck in my seat paying some attention to members of the cast and crew, but mostly I was sitting there in awe.  I’m honestly struggling to think of a film that has affected me on the screen so deeply, and the closest I can get is The Shawshank Redemption. While I’ve certainly seen many good films over the years, and I’ve seen some I would even call great, La La Land is something more, something special that came along that achieved what few would even dare to believe.  It is an achievement that writer and director Damien Chazelle deserves the many accolades that he will soon be showered with as we enter into the award season as 2016 comes to a close.  Just what is it that he managed to capture?  In my most humble opinion, he captured all that was and is great from the Golden Age of Hollywood.  This is a film that opens the door to the past, to when greats like Humphrey Bogart, Gene Kelly, Ginger Rogers, and Fred Astaire were the giants of the silver screen, a time that it seems Hollywood has all but turned its back on and become an industry of making CGI cash-making franchises and neglecting what brought us to the theaters to begin with: to show us how to dream, and to not be afraid to dream big.

Our introduction into the film (proudly boasts to be shot in Cinemascope), brings us into gridlock Los Angeles traffic and without warning passengers exit their cars to perform the film’s opening number, “Another Day of Sun”.  It’s a big number filled with dozens of performers singing and jumping from car to car as the camera moves beautifully between the performers.  The color in all the costumes simply pops across the screen, and this is simply a taste of what’s to come.

With talks going on about setting up colonies on Mars, long distance space travel is quickly moving away from the pages of science fiction to the next step in space exploration. Passengers is a film that taps into the possibilities of what this could mean for us as a species but also takes a look at the great risk that we would be facing. At a glance it would seem like a surefire Hollywood blockbuster to end the year, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that is a sure thing.  Despite the great effects and set designs, two bankable stars, and a more than capable director, Morten Tyldum (The Imitation Game and Headhunters), what you still need is a story that will not only fill those seats but keep people wanting to come back for more.  Sadly, what we have here is so much potential that caves into telling a safe and unfortunately predictable story that we have seen time and time again.  Strap in, folks, you’re in for a bit of a bumpy ride.

Welcome aboard starship Avalon, a ship filled with 5000 passengers and a crew of 258.  The ship is on its way to Homestead 2, a planet that the people of Earth are planning to colonize.  The trouble is, to get to Homestead 2 it’s going to take 120 years, so the passengers and crew need to use sleep chambers to keep them in a cryogenic state until they arrive.  Unfortunately for Jim Preston (Pratt), his chamber malfunctions and he wakes up 90 years too soon without any way to fix his chamber and get back to sleep.