Passengers (review)

Passengers chronicles the fate of the starship Avalon, the Homestead company’s ‘finest colonial starliner’. The Avalon is on a 125-year journey to Homestead II, with 258 crew and 5,000 passengers, all of whom are supposed to sleep for the majority of the journey and wake up four months before reaching their destination. The ship is on autopilot when it collides with an asteroid; despite having an intricate self-repair and diagnostic system, the Avalon predictably cannot repair itself, and the holes in the ship lead to progressively dangerous malfunctions. As a result of one of the first malfunctions, James (Jim) Preston (Chris Pratt), a mechanical engineer, wakes up roughly 90 years before he is supposed to and finds himself without human contact on the massive starliner. With no way to put himself back to sleep, Jim seems doomed to spend the rest of his life with only an android bartender named Arthur (Michael Sheen) for company. After a year of isolation, Jim becomes obsessed with fellow passenger Aurora Lane (Jennifer Lawrence) and horrendously decides to wake her up, condemning her to share his fate and leading her to believe she has also woken up by accident.

Prior to Jim’s decision, Passengers goes to great lengths to highlight his isolation and declining mental state, problematically suggesting morality is a luxury not everyone can afford. Many of the film’s visual elements are carefully designed to make viewers not only relate to Jim but to make them see from his perspective and imagine what it would be like to be him in an effort to make him sympathetic and likeable. The year Jim spends alone is filmed as scenes of progressive unravelling, highlighted through Jim’s increasingly messy appearance and aura of shrinking physicality. Close shots focusing on Jim’s body, rather than scenery, attempt to transfer his misery to the audience. The DVD bonus feature, ‘Space on Screen: Visual Effects’, highlights some of the movie’s most visually impressive achievements. Special Effects Supervisor Erik Nordby explains they attempted to make space ‘elaborate’, ‘immersive’ and ‘beautiful’, and the special effects team certainly succeeded. After months of being alone, Jim dons a spacesuit and explores the outside of the Avalon during a tethered spacewalk. The special effects crew transfers Jim’s sense of vertigo in space to the viewer through the use of LED screens, cgi and a harness that allowed Pratt to move as if he were weightless. Jim is forced to confront the sublime in all of its horror and beauty, and the special effects team aims to recreate this feeling in the audience though perspective and largely panned-out shots interspersed with closer views of Pratt’s face. Viewers relate to Jim’s loneliness, isolation and his sense of insignificance in much the same way the film connects his depression to the audience. Of course, such visual effects are carefully designed to justify his later treatment of Aurora. By forcing the audience to relate to Jim, the film attempts to suggest anyone watching would have attempted to wake Aurora in order to escape Jim’s fate.

Such a focus on audience is evident in additional DVD features, such as a ‘Book Passage’ section designed to mimic a corporate pitch for space travel and colonisation. The Homestead Corporation proudly proclaims ‘Your future is our business’, reminding us these ‘passengers’ are actually colonists whose lives depend on a corporate entity that is both absent and unreachable throughout the film itself. The only response we receive from Homestead in the film occurs at the beginning. In a humorous nod to stereotypical corporate customer service, Jim attempts to reach the Homestead Company for help when he first wakes up and a recording tells him his message will take 19 years to reach them, will require 55 years for a response, and that it will cost him $6,000. Despite this early scene, ‘Book Passage’ speaks to the problematic concept of corporate colonisation far more directly than the movie itself ever does, quickly stating...