Thanks for that fascinating and depressing bit of info, steronz.
I think the more interesting plot twist would have been one of the characters somehow discovering that the initial awakening was not an accident.
I saw it on Sunday night and I have to say that I liked it rather a lot. It was not a rape story in the least. It was a morality tale perhaps. As someone else mentioned, Pratt’s character struggled with the idea of whether or not he should wake her up and doom her to living out her life with him alone. He was not portrayed as perverted, or exploitative. He was desparately lonely and still struggled with the decision. Chris Pratt was perfectly cast in this.
I also want to point out that the life they were doomed to live together wasn’t very bleak. They had all of the extensive luxuries of the ship available to them, and even a robot bartender for a third person to talk to. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but it seemed like a pretty good life to me, in the realm of “living on a deserted island” meme. It was a deserted luxury resort island.
My other comment was that I’ve never really been a huge fan of Jennifer Lawrence. I think she’s rather plastic looking and unemotional. However, in this movie, she blew me away a few times. She nailed the look of horror and betrayal, and then later again she nailed the emotions of horror and having to make a horrific decision. I don’t want to give the movie away, but
IT
WAS
GOOD!
I am an extreme introvert, and this sounds like a living hell. People need people. Not just one person, but a community. And what happens when that one person dies? The luxury is meaningless without a community to share it with.
It’s one thing to ask, “Would you go with me if I were the last man on Earth?”…but making the arrangements is going a bit over the top.
Right, well I didn’t say it was heaven. Just perhaps not as Treblinka as some seemed to imply. And I pointed out that it was a morality tale. It’s purpose is to get the audience to wonder “would I do the same thing?”
Is it a morality tale, or a romance, or an action movie, or does it try to be all of those things at once?
I don’t ask that idly. I’ve been thinking very deeply about plot construction as it relates to character arc in storytelling. I’ve been watching movies, trying to see if I can parse out the different elements, and when it fails, exactly how it is failing. Perhaps it’s premature to call this movie I haven’t yet seen a failure, but then, if it works, how does it work?
from what ive read its trying to be 3 different movies and isn’t great at any of them ,
But yeah the previews make it look like a lost in space romance …
First, he isn’t Chloe, the real hero. Second, he still isn’t Chloe.
5300 at 4 months is 5300/3 man/years, or 1766.67 man/years of food. They used (by your figures 60*2 = 120 man/years. So, 120/1766.7, or 6.795% of the total available. Even if the ration were 2000 calories, that means the rest of the people would have to survive on 1864 calories for those 4 months. I don’t think anyone’s gonna even come close to starving on that ration.
The Trivia section at TV Tropes has some information about stuff that was in the original script. There’s still a lot of weird plot holes though.
A hydroponic facility was shown, and I got the impression that there was some kind of molecular assembler that could produce foodstuffs.
In terms of the “we’d forgive a lot once in that situation.” There’s an aspect that is a spoiler for the end so I won’t say in the open but it undercuts the ethical issues and slips the movie back into lame space romance.
[spoiler]Lawrence has learned the truth and completely separates herself from Pratt for some unclear length of time. Then over about 36 hours they deal with a life threatening issue which forces them to work together.
At the end of this, Pratt discovers a way for one of them to go back into hibernation but Lawrence refuses to because now she loves him too much.
Also, he didn’t just deprive her of a life on a frontier world. She was a journalist. She was supposed to take the trip, spend a year on the planet and then return to Earth to provide the first first-hand reporting from a colony world.
All of this she gave up after a few hours of danger-induced lust.[/spoiler]
Personally, a version I’d have liked more would have been much more focus on the psychosis of loneliness. Pratt eventually wakes up Lawrence (ideally without the pre-stalking), she learns and is devastated. Then something happens to Pratt and then some time later we see her waking someone up.
My wife and I just saw Passengers earlier today, and I also think that the reviews sold this movie short. Reading the reviews gave me the impression that Jennifer Lawrence’s character blithely forgave Chris Pratt’s character when she found out that he had woken her up, when she had every reason to be outraged. Instead:
Her reaction seemed very real to me. First she was shocked and stunned, then screamed at him to get away from her. She didn’t accept the apology he made over the ship’s PA system. In fact, she actually attacked him, and came very close to killing him with a crowbar. She then proceeded to simply shun him for a period of weeks or months (long enough for them to divide up the days of the week for use of the ship’s bar), before being forced to work with him again due to a crisis.
The action scene at the climax of the movie was the weakest part of the movie, IMHO, and was totally unnecessary to the plot (but necessary for Hollywood, I expect).
Also, the ultimate reconciliation between the two protagonists was more than a little pat, I agree. Regardless, the movie was much better than it is being given credit for, IMHO.
P.S. The reason I was so keen to see the film was to see a staple of science fiction stories brought to the big screen. For example, there was the story “Life Flight,” by Brad R. Torgersen in the March 2014 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact. In this story, a boy on a a similar interstellar ship is supposed to go into stasis after 10 years but discovers that his body will not tolerate it, so he is doomed to spend the rest of his life working on board the ship as others rotate in and out of stasis around him. He ultimately leaves an 80-year audio journal of his life for his sleeping parents to find when they awake at the journey’s end. 
As an unspoiled person viewing the preview, I thought it likely that it was going to be revealed that one had deliberately awakened the other(though the trailer didn’t reveal to me who, that was what the obvious ‘shocking’ twist would be, and the trailer did imply that there would be such a twist.) I’m still not all that interested in seeing the film, but I did have to point out that the trailer wasn’t some sort of perfect deception about the contents of the film.
Haven’t seen the movie but I’m wondering about the crisis they had to avoid. Was it something they created or an external one? If it’s external then the ship would be doomed if no one was awake any way right? Sounds like extremely poor planning to me.
I was wondering why they’d send a ship out with everyone asleep rather than as you suggested rotating the crews sleep cycles to keep things on track. That puts a lot of faith in technology never failing and being able to handle any unexpected scenarios. I can’t imagine a lot of volunteers for such a flight. That’s an extremely long time to be on autopilot. Things are bound to go wrong.
Plus the ship would need to be self maintaining and repairing as well. What happens if the repair systems are the ones that break?
To be fair, unless the entire trip is under power, once you turn the engines off there’s no need for a pilot, live or auto - Isaac Newton is flying the ship.
In general yes, but if you don’t want to hit anything that you had not anticipated in advance you need one even if it’s just an automatic one.
Actually you took my autopilot line a bit more literally than I did. I meant the entire ship was supposed to run itself with no human input not just the navigation systems. There should have been failsafes involved to cover unplanned occurrences in general and it sounds like they didn’t have one at least as far as passengers unexpectedly waking up and possibly in the event that I was asking about occurring.
Yeah, a maintenance crew waking up once per year would probably be a good idea.
The movie opens with the autopilot navigating through an asteroid field; shields take care of the smaller debris, and the computer avoids the larger objects. One of the in-betweeners is too small to avoid but too big for the shields. Over the course of the movie, residual damage from the impact causes the ship’s systems to fail in sequence, as each system is somehow capable of taking on the load from other systems, including the ship’s bartender, who becomes overloaded trying to do some other ship function.
[spoiler]The ship is a private enterprise, and JLaw explains that colonization is a huge moneymaker for these corporations. I guess from that you can infer that 1) people are willing to pay huge sums of money to get on one of these ships regardless of the risk, and 2) that safety isn’t as big of a concern as luxury.
That said, there’s some odd stuff when you think about it, like Chris Pratt wakes up and seemingly interrupts a bunch of robots (think Roombas, e.g.) going about their business cleaning the ship. But who are they cleaning it for?[/spoiler]
That’s the kind of hole which makes no sense. How could no one have realized that their system had asteroids that it couldn’t handle? Especially if they knew that they were flying through an asteroid field. It sounds like they were running these on a super tight budget and threatening their cash cow needlessly. Out of curiosity were there any robot repair crews shown or talked about who were trying to repair the systems that went down?
[spoiler] Well in the passengers were that risk tolerant then why would she be crushed that he woke her up? She should have been prepared for bad stuff to possibly happen especially at the point that she realized that had he not awoken her then everybody would have perished. She should have been super ticked at the company that was running the ship. That assumes that it did require teamwork to solve the problem.
Sounds weird to me and a bit of movie logic but not outside the bounds of reality.
As for the Roombas maybe the amount of cleaning would be overwhelming if they ignored it for a century or so. [/spoiler]