Now it’s my turn to disagree on word choice; “justifying” seems like the wrong word to me. Justifying your actions requires living up to your expectations, not just any positive outcome. It has to be predicted to justify the actions and decisions taken. Otherwise you get all sorts of weird justifications; I robbed a man, who met his future wife while giving a police report, so my robbery was justified.
Perhaps it’s just semantics. “Evil” does have a lot of baggage as a word. Would it be better if I described him as having performed a terribly bad act?
I don’t think we can discount those “weeks or months of him agonizing”. He considered the subject, researched Aurora. He put effort into figuring out how to free her safely. If we had a person who hated a politician, put weeks or months worth of work into figuring out their schedule and comprehending them, bought a gun and practiced with it… and then at a town hall meeting shot them, I don’t think we could reasonably say it was just down to a “moment of madness”. It may have taken Pratt’s character less than a minute to do what he did, but he was only able and prepared to do what he did in that minute because of his careful preparation.
To be clear, I consider killing the other passengers and/or sabotaging the ship to be heinous/monstrous behavior.
I consider Chris Pratt’s actions to be immoral and wrong (and greatly injurious to the other passenger), but neither monstrous nor heinous. Indeed, his actions are entirely predictable. If the average person were in his situation, I would not be surprised if they did the exact same thing.
True of all situations forced upon a person except death (or whatever else you consider to be “destroyed”). My life is altered by someone stealing from me. My life is altered by someone cutting off my arm. My life is altered by someone firing me for no cause. Certainly we can look to try and see the good in any situation, but I think we do have to draw the line somewhere.
After all, if you don’t; what’s your moral objection to kidnapping?
Point taken, though I did emphasize that Chris Pratt’s character had no way of knowing that another person would be needed to save the ship at the time he woke her up. If not “justification” then, maybe it was just merely a way for him to rationalize his actions after the fact.
Another good point. One difference between the two situations here is the lack of malicious intent on that of Chris Pratt’s character – he’s not acting out of hate, and doesn’t want Aurora harmed. Of course, neither does a kidnapper… :dubious:
Bottom line…while Chris Pratt’s actions might be understandable and even predictable, they are still morally wrong. His actions are closer to that of a kidnapper than that of a murderer. In his defense, he was in a terrible situation not of his own making, where the alternatives were to either kill himself or go crazy due to the isolation.
Mmmmmmmmmmmmnooot sure about that not wanting her harmed. He does want Aurora harmed - he’s aware, through his research, that she would be harmed by his actions, he just places his own desires above hers. “I will cause her harm, but it’s for a good cause of which the harm is a side effect”. To go back to our shooter analogy, it’s as if the shooter’s aim was to act against a political viewpoint he thought damaging, with the death of his target merely an unfortunate necessity. I’d agree with you on the hate part, though.
I’m not 100% sure that kidnap is the best analogy; one big problem is that, so far as Pratt’s character knew, there was no going back or hope of escape. Once she was out, that’s it, barring suicide. Forcing someone into a life they don’t want for your personal benefit has aspects not just of kidnapping but of slavery.
What he gains by way of defence from the whole going nuts aspect he loses for the selective way he went about the whole process. “I must commit the terrible crime of waking up someone, or I’ll go insane or kill myself” doesn’t match up too well to “Hey, this chick’s hot, and she seems like fun, and I’ll ignore the parts about how clearly she would hate to be awoken” as a thought process. There’s no particular evidence that he went looking for, say, someone who might not mind so much. Or even that he widened his search beyond the first person he was attracted to on sight.
Really, who he should have awakened was a tech working for the company. Such a person would have the best shot of figuring out a way to get them both back to sleep, and in the worst case, could at least not be considered completely innocent of the situation.
And if there were no company techs on board, then his real mistake was in ever setting foot on that ship in the first place.
Right, he spent weeks trying to break into the crew’s hibernation areas without success.
With respect to Chronos’ statement that that “his real mistake was in ever setting foot on that ship in the first place,” this is a interesting point. I’d like to think that if I were contemplating such a trip that I would make a point of asking what my options were if I were to come out of hibernation early, and that I would get a better answer than, “That’s never happened” or “That’s not possible.”
On a related note, if you can say that Chris Pratt’s real mistake was in ever setting foot on that ship in the first place, then you can also say the same for Aurora, but that way of thinking is fraught with peril, as it gets into the realm of blaming the victim.
We are operating under the assumption that Pratt’s character believes he will go crazy if he tries to live out the rest of his life alone on this ship. Is this a reasonable assumption, though?
He’s got an android to talk to, right? How immersive was it’s programming? Could he ask the android/ship’s computer for help in staying sane?
See, I don’t see that. She hated him, and almost killed him. She didn’t outright forgive him until she put herself in his place when she was afraid he would die. Her reaction was based on her own selfish desire not to be alone. In fact:
she didn’t say, “I love you,” or “I forgive you” to get him to stay; she said "I can’t live on this ship without you. Her fear of having to live alone made her forget about the lives of the other 5,000 passengers, at least for a moment. At that point, she understood the desperation for human contact that Chris Pratt had felt before. If she had gone back into hibernation in the Autodoc, he would be back in the same situation, but once she empathized with his situation, she realized she cared too much about him to do that to him. His actions were wrong, but I don’t see it as the actions of a creepy sociopath; it was human frailty.
I saw this movie yesterday on DVD. And aside from the issue of the propriety of Jim’s actions, and the whether the science was plausible, I was fascinated by the economics of it. I believe Aurora said the Homestead Corp would make an amount in million billion dollars from this voyage. Is the idea that they make that much just by launching one of these missions? Because the round-trip time is upwards of 250 years, so I can’t imagine they’re making money from whatever is returned from the colonies.
Plus I think Jim mentioned that the cargo contained trade goods. I can’t imagine how they guess what they think will be valuable on the colony planets, given the amount of time for messages from there to arrive on Earth, and for a ship to carry the desired stuff out there. I can imagine that a colony world says, “We could really use titanium/cotton fabric/computer chips/whatever” only to find that by the time the ship arrives with that stuff that they no longer need it.
And were we told that this ship was one of thousands of similar missions? How much stuff is needed to build that many ships of this size?
I understand why the story didn’t need it, but it would be interesting to learn more about the colonies. This colonization has apparently been going on for awhile, and an awful lot can happen during the 120-year-long-trip. How does the company ensure the colony they arrive at is anything like the colony the passengers were expecting?
Exactly. 120 years is such a long time. (And given they were traveling at 0.5c, more time than that would have passed for those on Earth or already on Homestead II; the sites I find claim about 138 years would have passed for those not on the voyage.)
In short, I don’t see how sending out colony ships on voyages of more than a century can possibly be a moneymaking venture. Unless the money is in charging people for the voyage.
Pet hypothesis: The passenger accommodations are buggy, and the company knows that they’re buggy, but they don’t care, because they get their money up front, and they control all communication channels from the ship and colony, so nobody’s ever going to find out about any mishaps. Aurora suspected this, and that’s why she’s making a round trip: She’s willing to risk the bugs for the sake of getting a huge scoop when she gets back. She’s gambling that, while they might edit letters home or the like, they won’t be willing to deliberately arrange an accident for her in order to plug the leak.
Perhaps I’m too hung up on the time span, but this is how I imagine that goes. Aurora gets to Homeworld II, waits a year and then takes a return trip to Earth. There she publishes her great expose of the flaws in the hibernation system. The hibernation system in use about 270 years earlier. The hibernation system that has been superseded, improved or replaced in about fifty-gazillion ways since then. I suspect the response would be underwhelming.
“I’m trapped alone on a spaceship… I have some engineering ability but not enough… I have 4,998 people who have special skills in establishing a new civilization to choose from… I’ll wake up the writer who looks just like Jennifer Lawrence!”
Finally got around to seeing this, give it a solid meh.
I think the problem was that they didn’t show Pratt really losing it enough to engender sympathy. His only defense is not guilty by reason of insanity, and they didn’t sell it. They needed to mine The Martian, and I Am Legend for some ideas; insomnia, wt loss, staring into space for a couple of days. Something like when Will Smith can’t put together a coherent sentence and cries because she ate his bacon, but I guess they had to keep him hunky and hurry up to the romance.
In his defense, they do show that when she breaks into his cabin for the beat down he initially defends himself, but when she raises the crowbar he lowers his guard. He seems to accept that he deserves to die, not really the behavior of a psychopath. A much darker movie might have been that she kills him, and much later we see her journaling about how many days she thinks she’ll last before she wakes somebody else.
My biggest plot hole is that he explains to her that the sleep pods are just for maintenance and that they were induced with much more complex tech, hey, wait a minute we have one in medical.
Alternative ending, ‘but you’ll be alone, again’, ‘with you sleeping in here, I think I can face that, one day at a time.’ Cut to the bar he’s sitting with his back to the camera, she walks in and sits next to him and says ‘happy birthday’, the bartender looks up as the camera pans around and says ‘has it been a year, already?’ and we see that Pratt has aged 30 years, roll credits.
