Review of Passengers (2016) by Dawson B — 09 Dec 2017

Passengers... Are we there yet?

Passengers, a movie that is so boring yet you still want to watch it. This show is about a group of people who boarded a ship that would take a lifetime to travel to the new world called Homestead 2. In order for them to survive this long journey, each person gets put in foolproof hibernation pods. Jim (Chris Pratt), had the one thing guaranteed not to happen, happen. His pod malfunctioned which resulted in waking him up leaving him doomed to live the rest of his life on the ship alone. He gets so lonely he creeps on Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence), and is faced with the decision to wake her up and not be lonely anymore, or leave her alone to finish her life the way she had already chosen. Spoiler alert, he selfishly woke her up resulting in forcing her to live out the rest of her life on the ship. Now it wouldn't be a Jennifer Lawrence movie if she didn't let out the ugly scream when she finds out the truth.

However, this movie was saved by the comical relief of a pant-less robot, Arthur (Michael Sheen) who also takes the roll of best friend towards Jim. This is where the movie starts getting confusing, because everything is great in paradise. It's your typical boy meets girl and girl ends up falling in love with boy (probably because he's the only one on the ship). At this point in the story Aurora still doesn't know that Jim selfishly woke her up from her pod rather than it having a malfunction like his pod. You have Arthur the Robot who Jim confided in and debated waking her up, and he was supposedly not supposed to have feelings, yet develops a moral conscience of Jim not telling Aurora that he did this. Eventually Arthur spills the beans to Aurora that Jim woke her up.

The entire movie seemed to flirt with the idea of what death actually is. Aurora is running around the ship telling Jim that he murdered her. If you're supposed to sleep for 90 years but you are woken up to live in an almost heavenly state, yet you're doomed and feel like dying so you get pressed with the decision to kill yourself or not. The movie goes back and forth debating if death is a literal physical death, or if it is being so miserable the rest of your life, you think physical death would be a better alternative. Jim was made out to be a poor person on the ship, but it seemed like you would have to have a lot of money to go in the first place. Aurora is supposed to be a rich writer, who would go to Homestead for a short time just to turn around to tell the world of her travels. She wanted the fame of traveling back to the future to tell of what Homestead has to offer. Jim was very depressed because he woke up, basically being killed, and almost commits suicide by exposing himself to space. Instead, he makes the decision of "killing" someone else so he wouldn't have to be alone the rest of his life.

When Aurora finally finds out, all she wants to do is murder him to the point where she actually beats the crap out of him while he's sleeping. She never ends up coming around to him until the whole ship is malfunctioning and she is physically going to die, but almost guilt's him into saving her. The end of this movie says that it is okay to "kill" someone as long as it makes you feel less miserable and was just another hypothetical of being stranded on a desert island.