Passengers

I’ve been looking forward to watching Passengers for so long that when it finally came to Vudu, I stayed up until 11:00 on Monday night to watch it.  The movie didn’t do as well as it should have since the PC crowd didn’t like the hidden twist involved in how Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence) awoke from her hibernation pod.  Now, if you haven’t seen the movie, don’t read any further, since spoilers will be discussed.

To give a quick summary for those who don’t like to visit wikipedia, 5000 people are on their way to a new planet in hibernation aboard a spaceship for the 120 year trip.  30 years in, Jim (endearingly played by Chris Pratt) wakes up to discover he is the only one due to a malfunction.  He tries and fails to get his pod to put him back to sleep.  He gets depressed and almost kills himself before seeing Aurora in her pod.  He watches her videos and reads her articles and falls in love with her.  He doesn’t want to wake her, knowing he will trap her on the ship to eventually die, but he’s weak and the temptation is too strong.  Over the next year they fall in love until she finds out what he did. Then she’s furious, calls him a murderer and wants nothing to do with him.  Then one of the crew’s pod malfunctions, so there are now three, but he’s dying due to the way he woke up. Knowing he doesn’t have much time left, he gives them access to the bridge and medical.  They realize that the ship is doomed because of the malfunction that initially woke Jim, and it takes both he and Aurora to fix the ship, to save everyone.

Now before I go any further, it must be pointed out that if Jim had left Aurora in the pod (as the ridiculous PC crowd thinks), he couldn’t have saved the ship on his own.  Everyone, including Aurora, would have died in their sleep.  Keep that in mind.

Jim dies saving the ship, but Aurora uses the crewman’s ID and saves him in medical.  She realizes she loves him and can’t live without him, so she forgives what he did.  Knowing she still wants to live her life with all the others, he tells her that he’s figured out that the pod in medical can also hibernate, and he offers to put her back to sleep.  Aurora decides she doesn’t want to leave Jim, and they live their life on the ship until they die.

The movie ends 88 years later as the crew awakens to discover a changed ship, since Aurora and Jim planted trees and grass and turned the main concourse into a forest. I really enjoyed the movie, but the following things immediately jumped to mind:

1. Did they have children?  Wouldn’t they? And what happened after those children grew up and survived their parents? Surely they must have procreated and had incestuous children, and those children would have done the same.  The ship would have been infested by possibly brain damaged adults/children.
2. If they didn’t have children, one of them would have survived the other.  So is his/her rotting body lying somewhere to be found? What if one of them died by drowning or food poisoning? The other would have been stranded on his/her own until death.  The only other way i can think of is that the survivor wouldn’t want to live alone and would have jettisoned his/herself out of the airlock.  Depressing, huh?
3. What if they fell out of love with each other after a few years? Or 10 or 20?  Would Jim still have been willing to put her into hibernation?  I would think this would have been the most likely scenario. I just don’t believe they were happy until they both died. It isn’t logical.  Or am I being cynical?

The movie makes you think. Well, it should, unless you’re a PC fanatic, then all you can think about is how evil Jim is for waking Aurora.  They demonize him as if he’s a rapist, but he wanted companionship.  She made the first move, and he never forced her to do anything.  But the PC crowd compares her feelings for Jim to Stockholm syndrome. For those who don’t know what that means, it’s how kidnapped people fall for their kidnappers, which is a load of rubbish.  Jim is just as trapped as Aurora is.  She didn’t even really have a purpose. She left her friends behind and planned on going to the new planet and then go back to Earth, so she could write an article about her experiences.  Nothing in her plan really changes. She ends up writing a book about her experiences, which is probably more exciting than what she initially planned. Besides, if Jim didn’t wake her, everyone would have died!

Could the movie have been better?  Possibly, but it’s just pathetic that it didn’t do better because too many ignorant people have bought into the ridiculous notion of being politically correct.  That is the travesty here, not Jim’s decision to wake up Aurora.