Review: Passengers could use more science, less drama

Warning: This review contains spoilers.

In the new science-fiction action–romance Passengers, a corporate-owned colony ship on a 120-year journey suffers a malfunction that results in two passengers—Jim (Chris Pratt) and Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence)—waking up from their cryogenic sleep and living on the ship alone.

If you’ve read other reviews of the movie, you’re probably already familiar with a major criticism. Aurora’s sleep pod didn’t malfunction; Jim opened it himself, and he hides that fact from her. In truth, Jim awoke first and was by himself for more than a year. Suffering from the lack of human interaction, he has agonized over whether to wake up Aurora, whose pod he encountered randomly and with whom he has become enamored. Needless to say, he satisfies his monomaniacal desire for companionship. Inevitably, Aurora finds out but in the end forgives him. Because in the movies, if two people really love each other, then they forgive any behavior that would be otherwise viewed as horrible, ranging from stalking to, as Aurora correctly names it, murder. (Jim, Aurora, and their fellow passengers aren’t scheduled to arrive at their destination for another 90 years.) Jim’s drastic decision will understandably upset many viewers.

As a work of science fiction, the movie favors the fiction over the science. Screenwriter Jon Spaihts told me that his original script provided a much firmer scientific foundation for both the trip and the spacecraft, but many of those details were either altered, removed, or not made explicit in the film. For instance, the movie opens with the ship flying through interstellar space, 30 years into its trip to a (fictional) star system, when it encounters a field of what appear to be asteroids or planetary debris. Although so-called rogue planets have been discovered between the stars, the presence of a debris field is highly unlikely. How did the original planetary body break apart? And why haven’t the pieces clumped back together in the absence of other significant gravitational forces?

Compounding the issue is that the ship attempts to navigate a path through the field instead of just maneuvering around it. The ship is equipped with an energy shield that deflects the smaller bits of debris but fails to prevent a larger piece from hitting the ship. Spaihts said he envisioned the shield providing protection and also scooping up particles that would be used as fuel for the ship’s fusion reactor, similar to the proposed function of a Bussard ramjet .

One scene clearly indicates that Spaihts did some research on interstellar travel. Late in the film, Aurora indicates that the ship is traveling at 50% the speed of light. Apparently Jim is already acutely aware of the consequences: The computer told him that his distress signal would take 15 years to reach Earth, and any response would take another 35 years or so to reach the ship.

Although I largely enjoyed the film, I can’t recommend it due to the problematic nature of the relationship between the two characters. I wasn’t particularly bothered by the general lack of scientific details, but I’m disappointed that more of the science that Spaihts included in his script didn’t make it onto the screen; he clearly has a passion for science fiction and the science behind that fiction. I would love to see a more science-heavy version of the movie without the distracting baggage of the Hollywood-relationship trope.