Passengers - 2016

I liked it, it was better than I thought. I only have a couple of things bugging me but all in all it was a good movie, well done. The story is rather simple: A starship on autopilot is supposed to reach a colony in 90 years, and everyone on board is hibernated for the journey. 5000 passengers and something like 258 members of the crew. The ship gets hit: it’s programmed to repair itself but something goes wrong. One passenger wakes up. He thinks they’ve arrived, only four months left, but has a bad surprise: he’s alone and it’ll take 90 years before reaching their destination. He looks around for a solution, someone to call for help, a way to get back to sleep, anything, but there is nothing he can do. 

——Here is the first thing I have a problem with, because it makes no sense, but I understand why they did it, I only wish they’d find another way, something more reasonable. When Jim (James Preston - Chris Pratt) tries to go on the bridge, access is denied to him, and that’s obvious of course, passengers shouldn’t go to the bridge. Still, why deny the passengers access to the crew sleep chambers? I mean, the crew is supposed to wake up one month before the passengers, and there’s never been a malfunction like this in the sleep chambers ever, it’s considered impossible, so why?? why deny access to someone that will never be there to try to enter? I mean, once the crew is awake, they have quarters, they don’t go back to the pods for the nights! So why should it matter if people entered the room and had a look at some empty pods!?! Of course the answer is: Jim can’t be allowed to do that or bye-bye-movie! Only reason I can think of.

———-

Jim can only talk to Arthur (Michael Sheen), an android working at the bar. It’s better than nothing but it’s not much, Arthur can’t even leave the bar. He tries everything: working to find a solution, enjoying the comforts that the ship has to offer, being apathetic… months later he’s on the verge of suicide. Then he sees a girl inside a pod. Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence) is beautiful as we all know. He reads every information, watches every video about her, and likes her more and more. He’d want to talk to her, but he knows he can’t. For weeks and weeks he torments himself because he knows he shouldn’t wake her up, but he’s losing his mind and is all alone and has a lot , A LOT of 

time on his hands, so one day he wakes her up (without telling her, even making Arthur promise he won’t tell her). It’s good that he tried to resist the impulse, etc. At one point, just before he saw her for the first time, I said “tell me that he doesn’t wake her up just because she’s young and pretty..”. Basically he does that, but not so simply. 

Anyway, she thinks her pod malfunctioned just like his pod did. For her it’s a bit easier because she’s not totally alone, there’s Jim to explain things and spend time with. They get to know each other, they fall in love, then after another year she says to Arthur that there are no secrets between her and Jim - she believes that, but Arthur knows that’s not true, so to be sure he asks Jim if that’s true, and when Jim confirms of course he thinks he has no more secrets to keep, and he tells Aurora that Jim woke her up. She’s devastated of course, but days later they meet another man !!! 

Gus Mancuso (Lawrence Fishburne) is a member of the crew, engineer or something, and when he learns that Jim woke Aurora he sort of understands what he had gone through. She yells that he basically killed her, but he replies that it’s difficult to judge because he was drowning there. His pod broke down badly, leaving him badly injured inside. He tries to figure out what’s wrong with the ship, but he dies too early. Still, he can now give his identification bracelet to Jim, granting him access everywhere on the ship. Jim and Aurora join forces to search the ship for whatever is wrong with it, and find the section where all the problems are. They find a super-heated reactor that Jim can’t cool down from the inside, so he goes outside to open a door… She’s scared that he might not make it, which would not only mean losing him, but also that she’d be all alone in there, but they had to risk it because there are more than 5000 people not just the two of them, about to die if they don’t repay the ship, and there isn’t time anymore. They succeed and she has to go outside too to retrieve him in a sort of “Gravity” scene, only this time she catches him - she must have heard me when I told her that she doesn’t necessarily need to reach his hand to take him back, she just needs to grab hold of the rope attached to him…

She brings him inside and in the infirmary because he kind of died out there, but as I said, if they wanted to kill him off they would have done it outside; once she brought him in it was obvious that he had to be saved, so she has him revived. Now everything’s fine, they are alive and together, the ship has been repaired and is functioning the way it’s supposed to, and all is good. He finds a way to put her back to sleep if she wants, but she doesn’t. She accepts his ring and they live together who knows for how long. Last scene is set 88 years later, when the crew wakes up to find the ship quite different - full of plants just like I imagined. She wrote about their life story. 

Just one thing. How come they never have children? I mean, it happens, I supposed one of them couldn’t have children, nothing unheard of, but there was no word on the subject, is what I find odd. 

Andy Garcia has a very small part as the captain of the ship.

ITA passengers :-)