PASSENGERS: A Film

I‘m currently sitting in an airport lounge, surrounded by passengers all waiting to go somewhere. The seats are all full, people are sitting on the floors, small kids are screaming and everyone looks slightly stressed, as they listen for the announcement that will tell them their plane is finally ready for boarding and they can get going. This seems a good moment to review the science-fiction film Passengers.

Directed by the German director Morten Tyldum in a remarkably short period of time, this is one of the gems that occasionally comes along without a huge amount of fanfare, and proceeds to push the bar up in terms of effects, acting, visuals and depth of interest that transcends the simple framework of the film. On one hand, the film is a beautifully visualised science-fiction film about Man colonising space through a corporate, capitalist framework. However, for me, very simply this is a film about loneliness, solitude and the search for meaning in your life. The main character, Jim Preston (Chris Pratt), is a mechanical engineer who feels that he has no more use on Earth, where everything is replaced rather than fixed. He therefore takes the somewhat radical step of booking passage on a colony spaceship Avalon to Homestead II, a newly terraformed planet 120 years’ travel from Earth.  Of course, that’s only the beginning, as his stasis pod is deactivated and he wakes up 90 years too soon, to a ship completely devoid of other human company. This is where the hard questions begin; since he can’t put himself back to sleep how will he choose to spend the remainder of his life on a spaceship, travelling to a destination he will never reach?

To begin with his only companion is the robot bartender Arthur (beautifully played by Michael Sheen) who, while he provides a human face and some type of human interaction, is still only a robot that has been programmed to interact on a purely superficial level (complete with bartender witticisms and platitudes) for the few months before the ship arrives at its destination, rather than with one man for an entire lifetime.  

Once Jim’s search for a solution to his early awakening has been exhausted, the next conundrum begins; the morality of waking up another passenger to provide companionship but thereby also depriving them of the life they have signed up for. Enter Jennifer Lawrence’s character Aurora Lane, a writer who is constantly searching for the new and, feeling that she has exhausted all the adventures on Earth, sees the colonisation of a new planet and space travel simply as the next adventure to write about. 

These two utterly opposing reasons for being on the ship (a beautifully designed, elegant structure that has more in common with a luxury cruise liner than a space ship) are the reason that the film is so engaging. Ultimately, their environment is one of luxury and recreation, where for most of the film there is nothing that either passenger needs to do in order to survive and no-one relying on them for anything. In this environment, where Maslov’s Hierarchy of Needs have been entirely bypassed, it’s about choosing how you accept the inevitable and whether you are able to find peace in having your choices removed from you.  And watching two entirely opposed viewpoints tackle the same fundamental questions makes for fascinating watching.