Passengers
Entry updated 28 September 2026. Tagged: Film.
US film (2016). Columbia Pictures. Directed by Morten Tyldum. Written by John Spaihts. Cast includes Laurence Fishburne, Jennifer Lawrence, Chris Pratt and Michael Sheen. 116 minutes. Colour.
In the future, people migrate to planets outside the Solar System in large Spaceships while in Suspended Animation for 120 years; these ships offer luxury accommodations and many amenities for passengers to enjoy at the beginning and end of the long flight. After 30 years, a malfunction prematurely awakens mechanical engineer Jim Preston (Pratt), and he quickly realizes that he cannot contact Earth for assistance or place himself back in suspended animation. So he spends years alone in the vast spaceship, entertained only by simple conversations with a Robot bartender (Sheen). Studying the sleeping passengers and their attached biographies, he becomes fascinated by a beautiful woman named Aurora Lane (Lawrence), a writer who has taken the trip to write about her experiences. Maddened by loneliness, he decides to wake her, telling her that it was the result of a malfunction like his awakening. For a while they develop a happy romantic relationship that lasts until the robot accidentally reveals that Preston deliberately woke her up, thereby condemning her to death long before the ship reaches its destination. She is naturally angry, but they gradually begin to reconcile as they must deal with a new problem: another accident has awakened one of the ship's officers, Gus Mancuso (Fishburne), and they discover that the ship is having multiple breakdowns that will soon cause the deaths of all passengers. Since Gus soon dies, it is left to Preston to take a spacewalk in order to effect repairs, and while he is ultimately successful, he is blown into space and dies; but Lane retrieves and revives him using the ship's "Autodoc". Pratt realizes that the Autodoc could be used to keep Lane alive until the end of the voyage, but she declines the opportunity, choosing instead to spend the rest of her life with him. At the end of the journey, when the crew awakens, they find the ship is covered with green vegetation planted by the pair and Lane's account of her happy life.
Sf has told many stories about people travelling to other stars at sublight speed in suspended animation, but there is always a rotating cadre of crew members awake at all times to deal with unexpected problems – like the ones that occur in this film. The failure of the ship's designers to take this simple precaution is one of several logical lapses in this film, including the need to outfit the ship like a five-star hotel when the passengers will only briefly be able to make use of its services. A larger problem is the essential immorality of Preston's action, a sin that should not be forgiven, especially as easily as it is in the film. But there are two telling scenes of spacewalks that illustrate both the pain and the pleasure of being in space: first, a bored and lonely Preston takes a spacewalk by himself, and it makes him cry and contemplate Suicide; but later, he takes a spacewalk with his newfound love Lane and they enjoy themselves as they soar together through space in the manner of the loving robots of WALL-E (2008) and gaze in wonder at the red giant Arcturus (which is actually too distant for the spaceship to reach, given its stated speed and the stipulated length of the flight). Despite their joy, the film is surprisingly dismissive of the usual inspirational motives for journeying into space, as the passengers are said to be motivated primarily by the desire to get rich on a planet in need of their talents. Overall, though, audiences seemed to overlook the film's flaws, and it proved to be a financial success. The film also inspired the Virtual Reality software Passengers: Awakening (2017) for Oculus Rift. [GW]
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