Fate is a very tricky thing to display in storytelling. It’s a powerful theme and one that storytellers like to capitalize on. But it’s important to remember that all stories are manufactured. By its very nature, fate is supposed to be considered a natural phenomenon; things play out the way they do because they were meant to happen as a component of a set timeline. The fact that people can go in and meddle with that timeline, specifically in fiction, can dilute the power and message that comes with a story about fate. However, the film Passengers manages to create an interesting scenario where the power of fate is on full display.
Starring Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence, Passengers is a science fiction film about a gigantic spaceship on a hundred plus year journey to colonize a new planet. Five thousand passengers on the ship are put into hibernation for the trip, but after a collision with an asteroid, one of them wakes up with ninety years to go. Unable to go back to sleep, the man makes a desperate decision to wake up a woman after over a year by himself. He’s tormented by his actions even as the two of them fall in love. But the asteroid did damage to the ship that progressively gets worse and requires both of them to fix.
Because of the isolated nature of the story, it’s extremely easy for the storytellers to control the variables within it. There are an extremely limited number of characters and the setting is isolated to a single ship. The inciting incident, the asteroid strike, sets off a course of events that inevitably resulted in the story’s conclusion. It might have been considered bad luck that the man awoke prematurely, but if he hadn’t, the ship would’ve been destroyed, killing everyone on board. It might also be a terrible act for him to wake up the woman, but again, the ship would have been destroyed without her. There’s also another event to take into consideration: the accident also awoke a third person, a crew member who gave them the access they needed to fix the ship. Without him, everybody would have died. All of these events play out along a timeline that results in a happy ending. Of course, it’s a manufactured story created by an individual, but it also set up a sequence of dominoes to show how fate works in action.
Passengers is now streaming on Starz.
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