Passengers, the review
The last movie I saw in 2016 was the Passengers, with Chriss Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence. This wasn’t a personal choice. I went along with my sweetheart. I guess, we both expected a very different thing from the film. Before hitting the cinema, I wasn’t convinced about it. However, this movie has proven a little treasure. I enjoyed it, but it also arose several moral questions. Perhaps, the most important one is: if you’re alone and you have access to wake up someone to share with you doom, would you do it?
[SPOILERS: this review is plenty of spoilers. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, I advise you to stop reading at this point. If you saw the movie, or have doubts about going to the cinema to see it, you can give this review a try.]
Jim (Chriss Pratt) is traveling from Earth to another planet in a spaceship along with 4999 other people. They encounter a huge asteroid and the pod where Jim is hibernating malfunctions. He wakes up 82 years (more or less) in advance! It means that he will stay awake, grow old and never see his destination. He is, for obvious reasons, devastated.
During a whole year, he tries to return to his pod. At a certain point, after taking advantage of all the facilities the ship provides, including a nice bartender droid, he starts to get depressed. There is no way he can go back to his pod, plus he is so alone he starts not to care at all about himself.
One day, he discovers the suits to walk outside the ship, and he decides to take a ride. When he comes back to the ship, he takes out the suit, but then he tries to go out without the suit. He almost commits suicide. Frightened, he rushes in running and stumbles on a pod where Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence) is sleeping.
She gives him hope and starts researching all about her. He watches the videos she recorded before the trip, and he falls in love with her. And then, he starts fighting the idea to wake her up. If he does, she will be as doomed as he is. She won’t be able to reach the destination. But, if he doesn’t wake her up, he’ll be miserable. He’s so troubled that he speaks with the bartender droid about the issue again and again. Until one day, he cannot handle the loneliness, and he wakes her up.
When they meet he tells her, it’s been a malfunction, just like the one that happened with his pod. He’s been alone for one year, and so she feels sorry for him. Aurora soon enters into a face of despair, similar to the one Jim had when he first woke up, and they even do the same stuff. However, she’s not alone. Jim is there. Soon they get closer, and finally, they become lovers.
But, Jim ends up telling Aurora that he woke her up, and hell breaks loose. She’s furious! (For the record: I would be furious too.) But after a while, another pod malfunctions and one of the crew members awakens just to frighten them all. The ship is heavily malfunctioning, and at this rate, it will explode: no one will reach their destination. So, they try to find the error and fix things.
The crew member ends up dead because the way he was woken up was plenty of errors too. Desperate, Jim and Aurora try to find what’s going on, and finally, they do it by chance. However, repairing it, it’s a mammoth undertaking. Jim needs to go out from the ship and risk his life. He almost dies, if not were for Aurora who goes out the ship and rescues him.
Then, Jim finds a way to put to sleep one of them. But, by that time Aurora decides to spend the rest of her life with him. And so, they modify the ship in their way. By the time the ship arrives destination and people awake, they find a full ecosystem with plants and animals inside it!
It might sound romantic, but there’s a moral issue with this picture: would you doom someone to your fate because of loneliness? Jim cannot handle his life alone, and at the end, he wakes Aurora up. He lies to her during a full year until he confesses. By that time, Aurora is in love with him. Then, he almost dies, and she rescues him. But, at this point, she is too involved with him as to let him go. When he proposes to her to put her to sleep, she decides to spend her life with him despite what he did.
At this point, we must question if Aurora really loves Jim, or if she’s having symptoms of Stockholm syndrome. In a way, he has kidnapped her because he feels lonely. He has treated her like a Queen and made her fall in love with him. But, isn’t that manipulation?
Neurotypical brains like mine cannot handle loneliness in a good way. As shown in the movie, Jim ends up depressed in a year, to the point of trying to commit suicide. The question here is: does loneliness make of us monsters? How manipulative can we become if we cannot bear our feelings? Would you doom someone else too?
This is a romance with great views to space. However, it’s also a creepy one because it makes you think twice, not only about others but also about yourself. If you feel lonely, would you manipulate someone into loving you and make of that person your hostage?
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Copyright: Images on this post (C) Passengers
