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My guess would be that after one died, the other would follow quickly through suicide.. Or maybe going together once it was certain one was close to dying..
The vast amount of vegetation suggests could explain the breathable air not being depleted.. But yes.. Suspension of disbelief... Could also be, just for the record, that the ship did not fill with breathable air until Jim's pod was opened. It wouldn't make sense to keep the entire ship filled when only the pod chambers needed life support..
I know, just where my mind wandered during some of the silly parts towards the end. Like why didn't his feet melt? And if the suit is that good, what's the point of the heat shield? Or maybe he'd have been happier standing off to the side by the lever instead of the middle of the exhaust port?
The ship not having a 'crew wake up' function for emergency is fairly unforgivable, however. And then obviously a way to go back to sleep. But yeah, even if no pods ever failed, there's a limit on self-repair functions, so has to be a way to get someone to go fix something critical. Without a random and statistically impossible (so they claim) pod failure, the ship just quietly explodes and is never heard from again. Yet Jim wandered the ship for 2 years and could have fixed it easily if he had knowledge and access.
Also, did Jim kill the future of the colony when he radioed back that the pod failed? If that gets out, going to drastically cut down on future passengers, or the company's funding line to create them in the first place. Hope the colony can survive with what they have, the rest of this ship, and any others that launched before his customer service complaint was formally lodged
B. Maybe B+ if I'm feeling generous, though it's a stretch.
Fairly boilerplate for a sci-fi movie, but what it did was well done as these things go. My biggest single problem with the story was how quickly it glossed over Jim's isolation and eventual breakdown. The movie could easily have spent the entire first half studying his deterioration instead of compressing it into the first twenty minutes. A lot of the complaints about the rapey vibe and how wrong it was of Jim to wake Aurora could possibly have been alleviated if the movie had taken the time to really make the audience feel his desperation and how unhinged his year of isolation made him.
That said, what the movie made me think of more than rape or kidnapping was actually parenting. If you think about it, nobody can ask a kid if they want to be brought into this world and be required to make the best of what they get in life. Parents just do it on the hopes that having more people around is better than having nobody, and the kids have to deal. Aurora didn't have a choice, but that also didn't stop her from living a rich and fulfilling life anyway. She got to love, create, plant lots of trees and watch a forest grow. Did we get to pick the world were born into?
Aren't all families Jim and Aurora, in one way or another, spinning through space on a big crazy ship?
What I had some trouble buying, but went along with, is that Aurora apparently never even guessed that Jim had woken her on purpose. He's an engineer and a red-blooded male, alone for over a year? And she's a journalist, as in a person trained to question motives and cover stories? C'mon...
The split second she asked him how long he had been awake and he answered a year, I could only think that any halfway intelligent person would have asked if he had woken her up. Even putting aside the "red-blooded male" part, he was functionally in solitary confinement for a year. Solitary is basically torture, with a long list of well-known psychological side effects.
Of course, that would have resulted in a much different movie from the one we got, and probably a much better one too. We all know that she's going to find out eventually, so I wish they had just gotten it out of the way and then come up with something more original to do with the story than watching two people fall in love under false pretenses.
Anyhow, once Jim and Aurora were outside in spacesuits spinning under the stars to magical Thomas Newman music, I realized Spathis must have seen Wall-E and decided to tell the same love story with humans instead of robots.
There was a much better potential ending when Jim was manually opening the reactor vent doors. I knew the director/studio would never do it, but I wanted to see
Jim die, Aurora spend a year alone greiving and going mad, then waking up a male passenger as we smash to credits.
For all its flaws, I have a soft spot for just this type of b-grade Sci Fi. It worked for me.
There was a much better potential ending when Jim was manually opening the reactor vent doors. I knew the director/studio would never do it, but I wanted to see
Jim die, Aurora spend a year alone greiving and going mad, then waking up a male passenger as we smash to credits.
My guess would be that after one died, the other would follow quickly through suicide.. Or maybe going together once it was certain one was close to dying..
The split second she asked him how long he had been awake and he answered a year, I could only think that any halfway intelligent person would have asked if he had woken her up. Even putting aside the "red-blooded male" part, he was functionally in solitary confinement for a year. Solitary is basically torture, with a long list of well-known psychological side effects.
Right, which is why I find it hard to condemn him for the immoral act of waking her up. Yes, it would have been nobler of him to off himself, but that would've made for a 30-minute movie. Also might've been interesting if he were religious, and believed suicide would be a greater wrong than waking someone up without their consent. (Though I suppose then the moral choice would be to go insane from the isolation.) Morpheus' analogy of a drowning man is pretty apt, IMO.
While I'm not sure how long the trauma of that kind of isolation lasts, not coming clean to her about what he did and having a relationship on false pretenses is, to my mind, far less mitigated by the circumstances; it's wrong and there's no excuse. That said, we embrace fictional heroes who do terrible things all the time, and the movie hardly soft-pedals his wrongs, IMO. Passengers has more thought-provoking sci-fi moral quandaries than all three nuTrek movies put together, and unlike Star Trek Beyond, which feels like an adaptation of a Trek action video game, it takes risks. I for one respect that, and consider it a much better movie than Beyond.
I thought of that, too. Would've made an interesting bookend, but I think I'd have preferred it if she went back to sleep willingly, maybe after a few more months. A lifetime is too long to spend with any one person.
But then we'd be back to him taking away her choice. The point of the ending is she didn't choose to wake up, but she chose to stay. If he just knocks her out and puts her in the pod, he's made the same mistake again, and learned nothing.
I don't see that the "moral dilemma" was needed at all, they both should have just woke up due to irrerapable malfunction and had to deal with their situation and learn to live/love one another in their situation.
That's another big problem with the story: there's two films happening here. One is a parable about the moral consequences of essentially kidnapping and imprisoning a person to stave off fatal loneliness, the other is an SF potboiler about three people waking up in deep space by accident and having to fix their failing spaceship. The two have been rather awkwardly joined together into one movie that doesn't do either premise as well as it could.
Yeah, and the thing for me is the "moral dilemma" just doesn't really give us much but wasted time. It gives us a few dramatic moments of her being -rightfully- upset with him before we're thrown back into the sci-fi crisis and that thing is forgotten -granted months have passed so she's likely calmed down and came to terms with it. We get some dramatic scenes -like her nearly killing him in his sleep- but overall it's just not needed. There's enough going on and enough story here we didn't need to have this thing happen.
I preferred the moral dilemma to the other stuff and would not have been averse to them jettisoning the broken ship subplot so as to do more with the ostensible premise of the film. I think it came across as a time waster precisely because it got sidelined by everything else.
That's another big problem with the story: there's two films happening here. One is a parable about the moral consequences of essentially kidnapping and imprisoning a person to stave off fatal loneliness, the other is an SF potboiler about three people waking up in deep space by accident and having to fix their failing spaceship.
Yeah, and the thing for me is the "moral dilemma" just doesn't really give us much but wasted time. [...] There's enough going on and enough story here we didn't need to have this thing happen.
I don't agree one bit. If they'd both woken up accidentally and without fault, what tension would there be to them becoming intimate and starting a relationship? Even if they wouldn't be particularly compatible in normal circumstances, when faced with the inevitability of spending the rest of their lives together, why wouldn't two attractive, decent people interested in the other's gender get cozy? The moral dilemma isn't "wasted time", it's the story's whole raison d'être.
I preferred the moral dilemma to the other stuff and would not have been averse to them jettisoning the broken ship subplot so as to do more with the ostensible premise of the film.
Trouble is, once Aurora gets over her rage towards him, she doesn't have a whole lot of options, which constrains the drama. She can either forgive him (whether he deserves it or not), and enjoy some human intimacy, or shun him for the rest of her life, which would be fairly agonizing in its own right. The damaged ship plot line may not have much to do with the characters, but it's necessary drama nonetheless.
I finally saw the movie. I rather enjoyed it. However, I thought the last third of the film, from which Laurence Fishburne made his appearance, seemed a bit rushed. I didn't mind the damaged ship plotline. I just wished that movie audiences got to know Fishburne's Gus a bit more before they were forced to repair the ship.
The moral dilemma isn't "wasted time", it's the story's whole raison d'être.
I agree. Even after the damaged ship storyline had started, the narrative was still dealing with Jim's guilt and Aurora's rage. I do like the fact that Jim managed to make up for what he had done to Aurora by suggesting she use the Autodoc to resume her hibernation. This would have left him without any medical assistance if he had remained alone. My sister and I discussed on whether or not we would take up Jim's offer. She said yes. I honestly don't know what I would have done. Hell, I don't know what I would have done if I had been in Jim's shoes.
My one other problem with the film is that it was vague on what happened to Jim and Aurora in the end. Not enough details.
We don't, but she did, she bought her ticket and had it all booked out in advance, someone else coopted it. Not the same thing. Or if we go with that analogy, having a child that someone else kidnaps and raises.
Alright, they're alive and living a potentially good life, but when they find out these people aren't their real parents...well.
Watched it today. Super misleading marketing. I expected a sexy space thriller with a mystery about why they were woken up (my money was on Lawrence being a robot Pratt's engineer character built).
The good:
I could watch Lawrence crawl over that table all day....
The bad:
There are a lot of plot holes and nonsensical moments but to me the absolute worst is that I don't think the movie realized that Jim, the lovable Chris Pratt character played by Chris Pratt, was the villian. Stalking (following her on security cams even after she tells him to screw off), murder (she and Fishburne are right when they call it that), and, oh yeah, rape... such an awesome guy that Jim is.
Lawrence's Stockholm syndrome giving him the awesome wish fulfilment ending was horrendous. She should have hoped in the auto doc and froze herself giving him the finger, leaving him to die a long slow death all by himself.
I "get" Fishburne's character's response to Pratt / Lawrence because he needs Pratt at the moment but I have a feeling from the scene where Fishburne learns the truth that if Fishburne wasn't dying, after he used Pratt to help him fix the ship, Pratt would have been visiting an airlock fairly soon after.
