journal features

movie review - Passengers

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Toronto, 2017.08.22

This is a Sci-Fi flick about colonists headed for a distant planet. It's a long way from Earth, it's going to take many, many years to get to its destination. The ship hits some debris in space en route. It's not enough to destroy the ship or even to cause the ship to respond with some kind of automated course alteration or to even wake the crew. Honestly, it's not clear from the events of the movie that the ship even notified anyone on Earth.

The incident does however disrupt the life support system of one of the passengers, and he wakes up. Realizing that he's the only one awake and that there are decades left in his trip, he sends a message to Earth but then realizes that it will take twenty years for them even to get a response - and that no rescue is possible.

Our man is a mechanic and he tries his best to get into the bridge or to wake some members of the crew. This proves impossible, and he spends the weeks and months that follow in complete isolation except for a robotic bartender who makes for limited company. Becoming increasingly obsessed with a female passenger who remains (asleep? in stasis?) he's on the edge. Meanwhile - and unknown to him or even the viewer - there is a great deal of trouble unfolding in the .. I want to say engine room.

I enjoyed quite a bit about this movie. Yes, it requires plot holes through which you could pilot the space ship itself. As someone who works in IT, I found their lack of redundant control systems simply unbelievable, and the lack of paths to human intervention ridiculous. That's not how we run small technology startups, let alone multi-billion-dollar investments and once-in-a-species-lifetime colonization efforts. Still, there's lots of engaging scenes and the story as a whole reached a satisfying conclusion.

Recommended.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)