Friday, August 10, 2018

Passengers (2016)


Passengers has a tough moral question.  Jim is part of a spaceship that takes 120 years to travel to another planet to colonize, along with 5000 other passengers.  Due to a system breakdown along the way, he accidentally wakes up from hibernation too early, and with another 90 years to go, he is doomed to stay on the ship forever and die.  Not that he is too bored since all the ship's entertainment is available to him.  This first half is where Passengers is at its best, as we start to see Jim adjust, and then slowly degenerate and go crazy with the loneliness.  Eventually, he dwells and decides to wake up another passenger, Aurora, whom he had been viewing and reading her history.  From then on, Passengers start to show all of its flaws and enters a predictable path on where the plot will go.  We know that Aurora will eventually find out that it wasn't a malfunction that woke her up but Jim (and this will definitely happen at the critical point when they are both deeply in love).  We know that there will be a forced climax to end the film, and it has something to do with all the small malfunctions that we have been seeing.  It throws a twist towards the end which was interesting but was also extremely convenient (what the chances that something they need just happens to?).  The ending has all sorts of plotholes since the film ignores all the obvious repercussions of what has happened.  Overall, Passengers felt that it should have ended after 1 hour and as a result, it feels pad and becomes too cliched.

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