This review of Passengers is loaded with spoilers.
If you haven’t seen the film yet, go watch it and come back.
Jennifer Lawrence’s character Aurora Lane is a beautiful writer and the absolute last person you want help from if you find yourself on a broken spaceship. (Image courtesy of Sony Pictures)
Passengers (2016): Why it’s important not to wake up the wrong people.
It really is an entertaining movie. From an engineering standpoint, though, I have no idea why everybody didn’t die. It was the testament against the Too Big To Fail approach to engineering. A company thinks their designs are perfect and will never fail. “It just works.” Sound familiar?
That said… let’s carry on. The premise of the film begins with 5,000 colonists on their way to an uninhabited planet known as Homestead II. All of them, including the crew are in hibernation and the ship is on autopilot as the trip takes 120-years to get there, traveling at roughly half of the speed of light.
The ship soon runs into an asteroid field and takes multiple massive hits, but luckily the ship has a shield that prevents most of the Manhattan-sized asteroids from penetrating. Only to fail as a Volkswagen-sized rock pushes through, ultimately damaging the vessel. As a result, some of the ships systems malfunction and mechanical engineer Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) is awakened from his slumber- beginning a year-long’s worth of troubles.
The Starship Avalon created by Guy Hendrix Dyas with its multiple rotating modules. (Image courtesy of Guy Hendrix Dyas)
The starship Avalon itself is great design- it has three long thin modules all interconnected to a spinning central hub and has everything anyone could want. There’s an entertainment section, learning center, medical bay, labs, mess hall and a bar, complete with an android bartender (Michael Sheen). What’s interesting is that the ship has systems that can be found today, albeit in rudimentary forms such as a self-healing (biomimetics) applications like those being undertaken by Arkema and an elaborate AI, which is currently being developed by a multitude of companies, but still in it’s infancy.
It’s the AIs job to take care of the ship, while the passengers and crew are in hibernation. It would then provide information to the populace when the awaken (where to go, what to do and their job roles) and this is where my first issue with the film begins.
Kudos on it waking mechanical engineer Preston, however it should have jump-started the crew first as they are the ones responsible for the ship and its passengers. Surely the programmers thought of this contingency, that accidents were bound to happen and would need a way to get the professionals, all 258 of them, up and moving when the ship is in danger.
This is a blatant oversight in failure analysis. Several times during the show, the computer system states there has never been a failure in “xyz,” so feel safe. Any system can and will fail at some point. (Even the HP LaserJet 4L. I’ve seen it first hand!)
Regardless, a mechanical engineer should be able to figure out where the damage is located and come up with an idea on how to fix it right? Wrong, after noticing he’s the only one awake it dawns on him something is amiss and goes in search of the flight crew on the bridge. Only the problem is, there’s no crew and the door to the bridge won’t open without a specialized wristband. Wristbands are worn by everyone and grant access based on job function and societal status i.e. wealth, etc. I found this part to be a startling realistic view of the future.
He then learns he has another problem- he was awoken 90-years ahead of schedule due to the ship’s damage and can no longer enter the stasis pod to go back to sleep.
Like any engineer, he heads to the bar and hits up the android bartender for a drink in an effort to gain a handle on the situation. After all, he’s has plenty of time to do so as the ship isn’t in any immediate danger just yet, except for… you know… minor damage from the asteroid collision. I try to imagine myself in his situation and find myself thinking about first: is the ship ok or is it about to explode, second: if there’s immediate danger, locate it and try to repair it and third, once the danger is dealt with or not possible to fix, try to wake the crew.
How a mechanical engineer tackles the problem of a sealed door. To his credit, it does look like he tried to hack the control pad on the side of the door. Or how about cutting through the wall instead? (Image courtesy of Sony Pictures)
He doesn’t do any of those things, at least not at first. He does in fact find a bunch of technical manuals for a myriad of devices, systems, tools, machines, and a practical storehouse of every object imaginable. Sorry.... no.... can't fix anything.
The first thing he tries is to fix his stasis pod and returning to sleep but it turns out he needs special equipment not onboard to do so. It also turns out the crew is behind an impenetrable fire door and no matter what tools he uses to get in, he can’t.
It should be noted at this point each person in hibernation has their own job title listed on an info display on their respective pods.
Why’s that important?
Well one, you can unlock the pods and awaken the people manually by hacking into a certain electrical board and two, I would find all the engineer and software/hardware people I could and wake them up to brainstorm the issues I was undertaking at this point. However unless we found a solution to go back into hibernation they would more than likely be pissed as hell to live with me, alone in space, for the rest of their lives with dwindling resources.
Preston, on the other hand, decides to take it easy and seemingly abandons trying to solve the issues with ship and crew and relax a while by breaking in to the ships other areas including high-class living quarters and restaurants.
This is another problem I have- as the time goes by (a year), he learns some Japanese and Spanish interacting with robotic restaurant servers. If he can learn new languages, why can’t he figure out how to get into the ship’s crew quarters? Why can’t he learn to code (if he doesn’t already know) and find out a way to interface or reprogram the door security measures to let him in or use the android bartender to help him get in by acting as an intermediary to the ship’s system if he can interface directly? A kind of ‘code talker’ if you will, there is just so many things he could have tried up to this point and no effort was undertaken.
Surely there are some engineers in here somewhere as they are headed to colonize a new world. (Image courtesy of Sony Pictures)
He slowly becomes suicidal after not having any human contact and decides to wake Aurora Lane (a writer/novelist) for companionship. Again, why not an engineer? I do have to hand it to Aurora though, as she does try to brainstorm ideas on how to fix the hibernation pods or find another way to go back into hibernation shortly after awakening. I mean, she even offers to try to help to come up with a way to build a completely new platform after learning about the tools and hardware in storage!
Preston shoots her ideas down claiming he has tried everything to fix all the issues, which made me angry, as there are no bad ideas, even those suggesting trying the same solution twice. “It’s impossible” is the cry of lasiness.
It’s at this point I was ready to throw Preston out of an airlock thinking he should have just cashed it in when he was suicidal. The amount of tools and materials, an extensive online knowledge base and time should have worked in the character’s favor; they should have been able to come up with a solution to fix at least some of the problems on the ship with all the equipment they had on hand. It made me think of the Apollo 13 crew and the solutions they and the NASA team had to come up with using nothing but a junk drawer of items and some duct tape.
Think of the film, the Martian, and the stoic calm way problems were dealt with in succession.
Preston modded a cleaning robot, outfitting it with a camera and control system but couldn’t figure out a way to get through a door. (Image courtesy of Sony Pictures)
The final nail in the coffin for me that made me want to pilot the ship into the nearest sun, was the fact that Preston spent time fabricating trinkets for Aurora. First an Empire State building and later modded a cleaning robot with a camera and control system to bring a note to her, asking for a date. He could do these things but not figure out a way into the crew compartment? I’m not going to go into detail with the rest of the movie, but suffice it to say, they only address and try and fix problems when it becomes 100% life threatening. The classic cliché of the last second left to go!
Yes, I know it’s just a movie, for entertainment, and it was entertaining to some extent. But, it centered on a main character who was a mechanical engineer. He had the tools, the materials, the knowhow and he blew it. All the while he had the skills to fix most anything on the ship, he wouldn’t or didn’t try hard enough in my book- just like he couldn’t fix this movie.
Best parts:
- Ship design, function, and the premise of traveling to a new world for colonization.
- Overall acting was believable, despite a weak story.
- Mechanical engineer Preston before failing at life and after he redeems himself.
- The authenticity of the technology onboard, not too far off from what we could have in a near future.
- Arthur, the bartender.
- Aurora’s ‘can-do’ attitude of looking to solve or learn to solve the myriad of problems afflicting the ship.
- Beautiful sets and backgrounds
- The end credits.
Iffy parts:
- No realistic approach to utilizing tools and materials to solve problems.
- Preston’s inability to work those problems on a serious level, whiny/suicidal attitude.
- Poor use of the concept of “engineering.” Bested by other films in a similar category, like ‘The Martian.’
- Aurora’s reluctance to chuck Preston out of an airlock.
I am giving this 2.7 out of 5. It’s Ok, but the potential is there to be so much better... as frustrating as the film itself.
Oh... lookie here... Passengers flopped.
