BEFORE: It was very nice of Hollywood to make a movie with both Jennifer Lawrence and Andy Pratt in it, and almost no one else, because I'm guessing someone knew that I would need to link between 6 other movies with J. Law in them, and another one with Pratt in it. It's this sort of forward thinking that's enabled me to keep my linking going, and to finish the year out the way I want to. It looks like I'll be able to link to "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" with just one day to spare - I do love it when a plan comes together. I can't believe another new "Star Wars" film is now just 12 films away...
THE PLOT: A spacecraft traveling to a distant colony planet, transporting thousands of people, has a malfunction in its hibernation pods. As a result, two passengers are awakened 90 years early.
AFTER: Why is space-travel so problematic in movies? Isn't it supposed to be this grand fantasy, to hop aboard a space-ship and travel via light speed to another world? While we want very much for this to happen, it seems that at the same time we can't believe that the process will work right, so most movies depict something going wrong. If it's not mechanical problems, like in "Apollo 13" or 'Gravity", then it's pesky creatures invading the ship, like in "Alien". Then there are the problems inherent to space itself, as seen in "Interstellar" and "The Black Hole". "Mission to Mars", "Red Planet", "2001: A Space Odyssey" and even "Planet of the Apes" - it seems like something's always going wrong on a mission. Is this all done just to create tension and drama in stories, or do we believe deep down that once we as a people finally get to the future, we'll find a way to screw it up?
Which brings me to "Passengers", because once you think you've solved the problem of how to get people to endure space travel, by using hibernation pods, then you have to figure that there's got to be a potential downside somewhere. In this case, a ship malfunction wakes up one passenger much too early, and he finds himself alone on the ship, able to survive but with no way to fix the problem or contact anyone for help. Due to the distance, any transmission for help wouldn't be answered for decades, time that he doesn't have.
He could just spend the rest of his days in luxury aboard this ship, designed to entertain 5,000 passengers who are scheduled to wake up four months before the ship reaches another planet. There are enough resources to keep him alive, but not enough to keep him entertained, apparently. So he goes a little cuckoo over the course of a year by himself. But then for the sake of his sanity he decides to wake up another passenger, and the most logical thing would be to wake up someone who could help him fix the ship, or better understand how to interact with its systems.
(I'm not sure if this is really a NITPICK POINT or not, but at first I believed that the ship intentionally woke up the character that would be most helpful in fixing its systems, since Pratt's character is an engineer. But apparently not a spaceship engineer or a computer engineer, since either of those would have been helpful. And I suppose the malfunction on his pod was more or less random - or...was it? I suppose it's asking a lot to believe that a ship's computer could take steps to repair itself by re-programming his hibernation unit, but then be unable to communicate to him the exact nature of the current mechanical problem, despite having androids that can speak to him and serve him drinks. That would be silly, if someone designed an A.I. for the ship that had arbitarily imposed limits on what it could do...)
Instead he does the illogical thing, he wakes up the hottest woman, who's also a writer, so that he can at least pass the time with a pleasing companion. But by doing so, he's potentially dooming her to a similar life in exile, and preventing her from living long enough to reach the colony world. Which makes me wonder if this whole sci-fi thing with the broken ship is just a metaphor for a different ship - relationship. Marriage has that whole "Till death do we part thing", so we don't seem to have a way to acknowledge you want to spend your life with someone without being reminded of your mortality.
And just like in a relationship, the two people here have to work together to find the root cause of the ship's troubles, deal with that issue and then try to repair the damage and move forward...
Also starring Chris Pratt (last seen in "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2"), Michael Sheen (last seen in "The Queen"), Laurence Fishburne (last seen in "Bobby"), Julee Cerda, with a cameo from Andy Garcia (last seen in "The Pink Panther 2") and the voices of Emma Clarke, Chris Edgerly, Fred Melamed.
RATING: 6 out of 10 tethers
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