Passengers Movie Review

by Devin Caldwell

Passengers is a science-fiction romance film starring Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt that was released in 2016. The movie follows the story of a pair of passengers on a spaceship who was awakened from hibernation 90 years before the ship was scheduled to arrive at its destination.

Plot

A ship, called Avalon, is on its way from Earth to a planet called Homestead II. The ship is carrying more than 5,000 hibernating people on a 120-year trip, which should provide them with plenty of data for their sleeptracker. However, 30 years after the start of the journey, the ship is damaged by an asteroid impact. The damage causes a  problem with the pod containing James "Jim" Preston, a mechanical engineer.

Jim wakes up and spends a year alone on the ship. His only companion during that time was an android barkeeper named Arthur. Jim is considering suicide when he sees a young woman, named Aurora Lane, asleep in her pod. Jim watches Aurora's video file and is taken with her. Jim is tempted to wake Aurora from her pod so that he will have her companionship, even though doing so would doom her to live her life out on the ship with Jim.

Jim gives in to temptation and wakes Aurora from her pod, but lies to her, telling her that it was a malfunction. Jim and Aurora fall in love and Jim plans to propose. However, Arthur accidentally tells Aurora the truth about the pod and she is furious with Jim, physically and verbally assaulting him before avoiding him entirely.

Another malfunction causes deck chief officer Gus Mancuso to wake from his pod. He finds that multiple systems are failing and without repairs, all of the occupants on the ship could die. Gus recruits Jim and Aurora to help him fix the ship but becomes seriously ill due to a condition caused by his malfunctioning hibernation pod. Gus dies hours later, but before doing so, gives Jim and Aurora his deck chief ID, so they can attempt to fix the ship.

While attempting a difficult repair, Jim is blasted into space in a spacesuit that is leaking oxygen. Aurora rescues Jim and revives him with the help of the ship's Autodoc. Jim discovers that Gus' clearance allows them to use the Autodoc as a hibernation pod for a single person. Jim offers to return Aurora to hibernation so she can live her intended life on Homestead II, but having faced living on the ship alone when she thought Jim might die, she has empathy for him and decides to remain awake on the ship with him. Jim proposes to her and she accepts.

The crew awakes 88 years later to discover a large tree, birds, vegetation and a cabin on the ship. They hear a voice-over Aurora recorded describing the life she enjoyed with Jim.

Review

Pratt and Lawerence have good on-screen chemistry. The film features impressive visuals and interesting costumes. The mixture of sci-fi thrills and romance makes for an entertaining movie, even if the story does fall a bit flat. How much you enjoy the film may ultimately depend on how you feel about the central plot point of the story. 

If you buy into the idea that Aurora could forgive Jim for robbing her of her planned life on Homestead II because she understood the miserable prospect of being forced to live on the ship alone, then you may enjoy the film as the feel-good story that the filmmakers seemed to intend it to be.

However, viewers who see Jim's actions as inexcusable and Aurora's forgiveness of him as a result of Stockholm syndrome or manipulation may be frustrated by the film whitewashing Jim's selfish choices and the happily-ever-after ending that results from Aurora's decision to forgive him. The moral dilemma at the heart of the story gives viewers something to think about, but the ending may have been more satisfying if the film hadn't assigned its own value judgment, instead of leaving it up to the viewer.