The great thing about science fiction: it creates unbelievable scenarios that force us to question the very nature of our existence. By using things that don’t exist yet, the genre can put perspective on our moral choices and the fabric of our lives. Sometimes, through the wildest scenarios, these stories can create clarity in something as simple as describing what is a life. Despite its shortcomings in other respects, the Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence film Passengers accomplishes this wonderfully.
The film is about a very large spaceship with 500 passengers going to a human colony on another planet. During the approximately 100-year journey, the passengers are put into a cryosleep. But something goes wrong and one of the passengers wakes up prematurely. This has never happened before in over a thousand journeys, and the ship is not properly equipped to handle the crisis. Because of this, the passenger is essentially trapped by himself and doomed to die alone. His solitude drives him to make a desperate decision to awake another passenger. They eventually fall in love, but everything is thrown into doubt when she learns he deliberately woke her up.
She is initially extremely angry by this revelation. She is a writer and so she hopes to write about her experience traveling the hundred-plus year journey to the colony and then taking another century-plus year journey back. But in doing so, everyone she has ever known and loved in her previous life will be gone. One of her major complaints for being woken up early is that the man essentially ended her life for her. But by all accounts, her life was already over. It would be over 200 years before she would return to Earth. Everything would be different. This allows the story to ask the philosophical question about the true nature of a life. Is it the people and places around us? Or is it our own self-determination? Passengers doesn’t necessarily answer this question. But, as great sci-fi does, it allows the viewer to ponder it deeply.
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