The Latest Incarnation of Base Humanity Heads Out Into the Stars

There is just no way to discuss this film without getting into spoiler territory.

There is a stellar sci-fi concept at the heart of Passengers, and it’s one that digs deep into the parts of the brain where true existential horror dwells. Loneliness is just one of those parts of the human condition that we can never truly escape. Being terrestrial beings, we are fortunate that if we search diligently, or just proceed continuously in a consistent direction, we’ll run into some other people. There are exceptions, but for the most part consumptive and pervasively profound isolation is a state that can be remedied. So imagine that unspeakable solitude — in space.

Jim Preston (Chris Pratt), through a cosmic accident, gets awakened early in what should be a 120-year hypersleep. There are 5,257 other people on board, and they are all deep in a state of chemical hibernation. There’s no way to return to stasis, and nobody else is scheduled to wake up for around 90 years. There’s budget-level food in abundance, and quality liquor courtesy of a bartendroid named Arthur (Michael Sheen, uncanny and generally fun). There’s a pool, and all sorts of activities, pigeon-like cleaning robots, and even themed restaurants. But that’s only going to go so far.

If there’s one universal truth about the nature of humanity, it’s that when given a chance to come to terms with the absolute moral truth of ourselves, the end result will be horrifying, grotesque, predictable and something that the individual in question will proclaim to be anomalous and not representative of who they actually are. But the truth is that it is who we are. We’re willing to empathize with something monstrous done by a person previously exhibiting "normal" or "relatable" behavior, not because of an expanded and empathetic human consciousness, but because we hope that the same empathy would be extended to us if we were in a situation of having our truest natures on display for all to see.

So Jim uses his engineering skills to awaken Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence), a writer whom he has fallen in love with, thanks to her extant writings, passenger manifest video (this bit was a tad unclear; it seemed like the Interstellar starship was also a video dating service for its colonists), and the fact that ... well, y'know, Jennifer Lawrence. So now he’s not alone anymore, even though he has basically sentenced a woman he professes to love to die in transit on this impeccably designed spiral space galleria. Their initial interactions with one another are cute and charming, and would be exponentially more effective if everything weren’t built on a foundation of all the icky.

But as a surprise guest star summarizes, attractive people make untenable situations somehow more bearable, or something to that effect, before dying of a combination of hundreds of diseases as well as spacism (that’s when nonwhite people die first in sci-fi movies). Aurora finds out (in as close to a Three’s Company setup as you can get millions of miles from the earth), she beats his ass (not nearly enough), and because this is a Hollywood movie, she eventually forgives him. Now, there’s still about half an hour or so of movie to go at this point, because things have to happen to justify that forgiveness. The thing is, nothing can, though the film makes sure to give Lawrence’s character a couple of chances to say some things which read as supremely selfish.

Passengers is insidious if you look at it as an escapist sci-fi narrative about love spanning a greater distance than the stars, or about how female agency just doesn’t compute sometimes. But at times it feels like there’s more there — a willingness to address the way that men dehumanize, no, depersonify women in order to let their "wistful desires" take primacy over the choice of a consenting and conscious person. But all that is just sort of lurking around the periphery of the story, impeccably designed and executed, state of the art, the latest incarnation of base humanity, heading out into the stars. To spread.

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