Review #2: Passengers
If you woke up on an interstellar passenger ship all alone.
“A friend once said, ‘You can’t get so hung up on where you’d rather be that you forget to make the most of where you are.’ We got lost along the way. But we found each other. And we made a life. A beautiful life. Together.” -Aurora
Synopsis
In the future, interstellar colonization has been monopolized by The Homestead Company, where demand is driven by the human need to expand and start anew. Enormous starships ferry inanimate passengers in hibernation pods away from Earth, and towards the Homestead colonies light-years away. One of these starships, the Avalon, is en-route to Homestead II when it is ambushed by a RoGuE aStErOiD fiELd, wreaking havoc on all of the ship’s systems. Being fully autonomous, the vessel’s AI works to reroute power from other areas of the ship in order to restore the critical systems to working operation. In the midst of this endeavor, passenger Andy Dwyer from Parks and Rec… I mean Jim Preston, is awoken from a malfunction in his hibernation pod. 90 years from arrival at the new colony, Jim finds himself completely alone on a ship of 5000 sleeping passengers.
He meets an android bartender, who is active for some reason, and they become friends. Unfortunately, the android has male programming and Jim isn’t about to swing for any other team, robots or men. He gets lonely. He gets depressed. He starts to go crazy. Then, he discovers the hibernation pod of Ms. Aurora Lane, a writer and adorable blonde. After creeping on her entire life via future-Facebook, he decides that it is a good idea to wake her up too so that their lives can be ruined together. They grow closer, she eventually finds out what he did, she gets pissed, but then they have to work together to solve the problem that actually put them there in the first place. Oh, and another guy wakes up and dies too.
Mood/Setting
If I were to rank this movie solely on the setting and the mood conveyed, it would be near the top of my sci-fi list. The Avalon might be my favorite interstellar spacecraft ever designed by Hollywood; sleek, realistic, and bold. The entire opening act was incredible. Not a word was spoken about the presence of the lurking asteroid field, the damage it caused, or the AI attempting to repair it, but the message was conveyed clearly.
The white walls, holographic screens, and seamless structures within the spacecraft are all very well designed and portrayed in tandem with the setting. The loneliness of Jim’s awakening is executed wonderfully. All of the rooms and hallways of the Avalon are designed with enormous amounts of space to juxtapose Star-Lord’s solitude... I mean Jim. The peacefulness and tranquility of space is also well represented in this movie during the voyage. The music score was also enjoyable. Humor was hit or miss.
Plot Review
What is it with rogue asteroid fields and movies? How many trips have been made to Homestead II that haven’t been affected by this rogue asteroid field, and how? Nevertheless, here is the predicament we are placed in, and asked not to question. The scene is actually rather beautiful; the Avalon’s projected forcefield disintegrating the onslaught of asteroids. I just wish the movie’s science advisers would have at least mentioned an undocumented rogue planet or something to go along with their rogue asteroid field, because asteroid fields don’t just up and leave star systems.
The side effects of the collision are believable. To make trip times low enough to profit on, interstellar vessels would require the capability to attain an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. A collision with an asteroid the size of your fist at even 5% of the speed of light would result in an explosion equivalent to ten Hiroshima bombs. Nobody can tell me that it is impossible that a temporary hole opened up in the shield during a collision with a larger asteroid to allow a smaller asteroid in to breach the hull and impact some key systems. The ship’s computer attempts to repair these systems, but it can’t, causing a “cascade failure”. I can’t help but think in the aftermath of a collision that catastrophic, the crew (or androids who aren’t bartenders) would have been awakened to take over detailed repairs.
Nevertheless, throughout the rest of the movie increasingly severe malfunctions begin to occur across the ship, starting with Jim’s hibernation pod. This wouldn’t be a problem if the Avalon’s customer service AI was even 1% as smart as it’s critical system’s repair AI, but for some reason, the ship can’t even comprehend that Jim has awoken nearly a century before the ships arrival at the new colony. Furthermore, the Homestead Company has neglected to install any fail-safes whatsoever in the event that a passenger awakens during the voyage, because it is “impossible”… the same way that it was impossible to travel faster than sound, or to cook a burrito in a machine in under 3 minutes.
Jim tries to send a message back to Earth to let them know of his predicament. Here, the movie accurately depicts communication time delay due to the vast distances between stars, something that a lot of sci-fi movies just ignore or write off with crazy space inventions. So props to the same science advisers who threw in a rogue asteroid field. Oh, while I’m at it with the science advisers, why does everything on the ship just miraculously turn on when Jim awakens? If the ship doesn’t expect anyone to ever wake up before the arrival date, why would it be programmed otherwise?
So, Jim goes nuts spending a year in solitude on the Avalon. His only friend is an android named Arthur who is a smooth talking bartender… Apparently the only bartender The Homestead Company bothered to invest in on a ship of 5000 people. Meanwhile, Jim stumbles across the passenger directory and discovers Aurora. He becomes infatuated with her and, like an asshat, he unilaterally decides it’s best for everyone to wake her up to share in his loneliness. The ethics of him reanimating Aurora can be debated, but I cannot say that everyone presented with an entire year of zero human contact would not have made the same decision. Morality aside, she’s awake now.
The first time I saw this movie, I thought Jim was going to tell Aurora that he too had just woken up, and Aurora would have to find out on her own that he was lying by evidence from the past year. Though perhaps more cliche, I think that would have made a better plot device for two reasons: (1) It would be cool to see Aurora’s steady collection of incriminating evidence and (2) that way, Aurora’s character wouldn’t be completely helpless. Seriously, the script throws Jennifer Laurence around like a pie at a clown festival. She doesn’t find out anything on her own and she doesn’t do anything to further the plot. The only useful thing she manages to do is save Jim at the end, which is a kick in the face to her character. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Instead, Jim shows her that he has been working hard the past year to try to find a way to return to hibernation or wake up a superior to help him. Jim and Aurora grow closer, and we learn about both of their pasts and their motives for leaving Earth. This is one of the humblest points the movie achieves in character development, building on top of the fragile sheet of lies that Jim has fed to Aurora. Eventually Aurora finds out about her awakening when she tells Arthur that her and Jim have “no secrets between them”. This prompts Arthur to believe that Jim has already told Aurora about waking her, so he asks about it (actually, a fairly credible use of AI here). The next several scenes of the movie is Aurora being mad, and Jim trying to fix his mistake unsuccessfully.
Then, another nearly useless character, Gus, has his pod malfunction and wake him up. Gus is a chief deck officer, so he can finally get into the command center to find out what has been causing all of these malfunctions. This turns out to be Gus’ only purpose in the movie, because shortly after this, he gets sick from the side effects from being prematurely awoken, and dies. Fortunately, he gives Jim and Aurora his ID access badge and tells them exactly what the problem is and how to fix it before his untimely death. Also, don’t ask why Chris Pratt didn’t die when his pod malfunctioned, I don’t know.
It turns out that the cascade failure has gotten pretty bad since their collision with the asteroid two years ago. The ship had been attempting to repair higher tier systems with lower tier systems, but has caused a waterfall of problems along the w… OH MY GOSH that’s why they call it a “cascade failure”! Anyways, the heaviest damage resides within the computer module which governs the fusion reactor, and Jim and Aurora are forced to work together to prevent the destruction of the ship.
Turns out the fusion reactor needs to be vented to the exterior, and of course the computer fails to do it on its own. So, of course, Jim has to go out there and do it himself like a hero, while Aurora pulls a lever or something (she almost doesn’t even do this right). They are able to vent the reactor successfully, but Jim is knocked unconscious. Aurora has to perform a spacewalk to recover his body, bring him back to the ship’s medical AI, the Autodoc, and resuscitate him with literally every resuscitation option in the medical computer. I can’t help but believe that this would actually kill him more.
The ending scene with the tree that they had planted earlier on the ship which was then fully grown alongside an entire garden was sort of clever, except for the fact that I guess they didn’t have any kids after all that. I feel like a cooler ending would have been if Aurora was only a figment of Jim’s imagination helping him to get through his loneliness. Seriously, wouldn’t that have been a kick-ass plot twist?!
Conclusion
Though the plot has a few flaws and strange devices, sci-fi fans should still award this movie with a watch. It’s long, with a lot of time that could have been condensed down using a more interactive story line, but all-in-all, Passengers is a really beautiful movie that raises some very intriguing questions… even if it falls flat on it’s face trying to answer some of them.
