Tremendous piece whose only flaw is that it gives Villaneuve all the credit for what was an unusually functional collaboration. Most of the themes of the film go back to Ted Chiang, who wrote a brilliant but seemingly unfilmable story. Eric Heisserer saw how it could be done (to begin with, remove time indicators from the beginning) and pitched it unsuccessfully to 30 producers before mentioning it to Dan Levine and Shawn Levy, who read the story, loved it, and immediately thought of Villaneuve as the director. Who turned out to be itching to do science fiction. There are lots of antidotes-to-bad-movies lessons there. It’s worth noting that the basic idea of Passengers was done brilliantly by Philip K. Dick in “I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon” (a/k/a “Frozen Journey”). Why not just adapt that?