A handful of eerily staged scenes and a surfeit of passably evocative production design can’t save the otherwise muddled, new-to-DVD Passengers, in which recent Oscar nominee Anne Hathaway stars as a grief counselor assigned to help survivors of a fiery plane crash. In trying willfully to tick such a wide variety of genre boxes, though, the gauzy melodrama ends up servicing none that credibly.

Assigned by her boss (Andre Braugher) to
help walk a quintet of airplane crash survivors through their shock and
grief, psychologist Claire Summers (Hathaway) encounters particular
difficulties with one of them, Eric (Patrick Wilson). While others display
behavior more consistent with massive trauma, Eric is bouncy and charged by a newfound energy, but also secretive. He flirts with Claire and asks her out
on dates, which strikes her as odd. As her other clients begin
to disappear, though, Claire finds herself swimming in paranoia,
suspecting a strange airline employee (David Morse) of having a hand in their
disappearance, possibly to cover up the real reasons for the crash.

Narratively, Passengers marks a departure from the past films of Colombian-born director Rodrigo Garcia (Nine Lives), whose recent small screen work on HBO’s In Treatment showcased a level of psychological engagement not on display here. Passengers‘ mystery never takes hold, mainly because Ronnie Christensen’s script
is a thinly sketched mood-piece of appropriated motifs and
characterizations. Almost a decade on, the huge success of M. Night
Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense is still spawning mystery-thrillers
that seem chiefly backwards-plotted, with gimmicky point-of-view pivots
that are meant to draw appreciative audience reactions out of a
re-framing of the narrative. Given the loose, unrealistically pitched nature of some of the characters in Passengers,
though, it’s quickly apparent that the movie isn’t a straight dramatic
telling, and only a small handful of scenarios seem plausible. Rodrigo,
accordingly, is left to try to imprint and impress a unifying visual
strategy on this forestalled revelation, with only fitful success.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Passengers comes presented in 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen, with English and French language Dolby digital 5.1 audio tracks, and complementary English, French and Spanish subtitles to boot. Three deleted scenes run under eight minutes, while a 24-minute making-of featurette includes boilerplate interviews with cast and crew. More specific is a 16-minute featurette focusing on the special effects and stunt work used to capture the movie’s emotional centerpiece, its plane crash. The heftiest supplemental feature, though, is a feature-length audio commentary track with Garcia and Wilson; the pair ladle praise on the absent Hathaway, and generally strike a nice balance between production anecdotes and thematic discussion. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) B (Disc)