There’s a little more than a month to go until the sci-fi adventure Passengers arrives in theaters, but Sony Pictures has offered up an early peek at the much-anticipated film with a new clip.
In the brief scene (which Entertainment Weekly debuted on its Facebook page), Jennifer Lawrence’s character decides to go for a swim, only to have the gravity cut off in the spaceship on which she and Chris Pratt’s character are traveling. The result is a dangerous — but visually impressive — sequence that finds her uncertain about which way to swim in order to avoid drowning as giant masses of water float around her.
Directed by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Morten Tyldum (The Imitation Game), Passengers is based on a script by Prometheus writer Jon Spaihts that was once regarded as one of the best unproduced screenplays of the last decade or so.
The film follows a pair of passengers (Lawrence and Pratt) on a spacecraft bringing 5,000 human colonists to their new home on a far-off planet. When the pair are awakened 90 years early, these two strangers have to face the possibility that they’ll have to live out their entire lives aboard the spaceship together — lives that could end sooner than expected when they discover that the ship and its passengers are in terrible danger.
Although the film focuses on the characters played by Lawrence and Pratt, the supporting cast includes Michael Sheen, Laurence Fishburne, Aurora Perrineau, and Andy Garcia.
Passengers first gained attention when Spaihts’ script was included in the 2007 edition of “The Black List” — an annual list of the best unproduced screenplays circulating around Hollywood. Various creative teams and cast members were attached to the film over the years, including one iteration that had Keanu Reeves and Reese Witherspoon playing the lead roles.
Passengers hits theaters December 21.