Passengers Review

I am reviewing the 2016 American science fiction adventure film Passengers.

Production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas and set decorator Gene Serdena were nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Achievement in Production Design category.

Composer Thomas Newman was also nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures, Original Score category.

I think Academy Award nominee Morten Tyldum and fourteen-time Academy Award nominee Thomas Newman may or may not win an Academy Award at the same time in the future if they keep working together, particularly if John Williams is hired as one of the producers in association with another producer with an Academy Award nomination in the Best Motion Picture of the Year category.

This film was released by Columbia Pictures, a Sony (NYSE: SNE) subsidiary and it was a huge commercial success with global ticket sales of more than $293 million as of 02/16/2017.

Sony is still the largest consumer electronics company in the entire world with annual sales of more than $72 billion and annual profits of more than $1.31 billion back in 2016.

The whole film takes place in a very distant future when booking a flight to another planet is as common as buying a bus ticket to another town today.

As you probably already know, Alpha Centauri is very close to us and we can go there in a spaceship traveling at the speed of light in about four years give or take a few months.

Obviously, we cannot build a spaceship with these capabilities at this point in time.

Our new Solar Probe Plus currently in construction is going to be launched in 2018 and it will travel to about 0.067% the speed of light.

As you can see, if we somehow manage to build a spaceship traveling at just 0.1% the speed of light it would take us more than 4,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri.

In this film, they are taking a trip for only 120 years which means there are several possibilities.

Spaceships in the very distant future can travel a lot faster than 0.1% the speed of light.

Human beings call their home planet Earth even if they were born on another planet. I like this theory a lot because that would explain how you can take a 120 years trip from Earth to another planet.

Human beings born on other planets and raised by robots and computers are being told they were born on Earth for psychological reasons to protect the long-term mission of spreading the human race all over the galaxy.

There is no Earth in the future, it was destroyed by ourselves with our stupid Dodge Vipers burning a lot of foreign oil.

The Earth is still there but it's empty.

I think a more plausible scenario would be to simply change the 120 year trip to a more realistic figure like 1,200 years or maybe 12,000 years.

A lot of film critics were a bit harsh in their reviews for this scientific inaccuracy.

If you consider our first spaceships were traveling at X miles per hour and this number is increasing over time then we could theoretically build a spaceship capable of traveling to another planet in just 120 years if you wait enough time.

This movie could take place millions of years from today and that would give us enough time to build a fast spaceship.

This spaceship is taking 5,000 passengers to another planet. If you are going to build a spaceship and you cannot use it for anything else for the next 120 years then you need to make every single trip as profitable as possible.

In other words, you need to transport 50,000 passengers or maybe even 500,000 passengers on every trip if you wish to turn a profit. The technology to move a spaceship from one planet to another is exactly the same if you use it to transport 5,000 passengers or 50,000 passengers.

However, this can also be easily explained, maybe this spaceship was built by the government and not by SpaceX or Blue Origin.

We already know the government likes to waste a lot of time, money, and talented individuals in extremely stupid ideas like building a wall between Mexico and the United States of America.

A spaceship holding only 5,000 passengers seems like something the government would build.

The only way to travel from one planet to another for 120 years is in a state of suspended animation.

It does not matter how many times you test each piece on the sleeping pods, eventually one of them will fail.

In fact, if you build six million sleeping pods, one of them will eventually malfunction and this is exactly what is happening in this film.

You cannot build a factory and expect to build every product perfectly. It is simply impossible.

Our current six sigma system allows for a defective sleeping pod in every six million sleeping pods and I suspect this system is not going to change in the foreseeable future.

Reducing the number of errors to say, one in every seven million is extremely expensive and nobody is even trying to change that anymore.

You will sometimes get a donut with a dead fly. Deal with it.

Our main character wakes up 90 years ahead of schedule and the first thing he tries to do is to call Earth.

The telephone operator warns the passenger with an ambiguous warning like "This service is expensive" or something similar. If I am making a really long distance call from a spaceship to Earth I really would like to know how much money I am spending per second before I make that call so I can decide if I should make it or not.

By the way, calling 911 should be free, even if you are in a spaceship.

All transportation companies usually have a toll-free number to call them just in case of an emergency.

Apparently, the company moving all the passengers is too arrogant or simply too stupid to offer a toll-free phone line to all passengers in case of an emergency.

Human beings are not built to survive in space and a million things can go wrong when you are traveling for 120 days from one point on Earth to another point on Earth. A 120 years journey is going to generate a few problems.

It's simple math, really.

I don't know who the risk manager of this space company is but he is probably going to get fired after the movie ends. That's a good ending for this film.

Also, I imagine a scene where the lawyers of the space company offer our angry passenger a coupon for a flight to any planet of his choosing as long as the planet is located at a distance of 240 years or less. Another good ending for this film.

Let's just hope Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are watching this film and learn a few things about security measures.

I don't want to explode on my next trip to Mars.

If we are in an emergency situation like our spaceship crashed or maybe a bunch of aliens are trying to eat all the passengers, or in this case, a meteor damaged our spaceship and oxygen is escaping then they need to offer complimentary meals to all the passengers.

This is not going to help them survive but at least they will die with their stomachs filled.

The passenger spends a year eating the cheapest meal on the spaceship because he is not a wealthy passenger and he cannot order anything luxurious.

We can build a spaceship and travel to other planets but we cannot build the T-X played by the extremely attractive model Kristanna Loken to satisfy our sexual needs in space?

This is highly unlikely. I mean, we now have sex dolls in this day and age. I am pretty sure the boys at Google (NASDAQ: GOOG, GOOGL) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) are building a female robot as we speak and I don't mean for military purposes.

There is a robot bartender and he talks and listens and everything just like a human being but if you are by yourself on a spaceship without female companionship you will eventually go insane if you are a heterosexual male and that is exactly what happens in this film.

I propose the following emergency procedures for all future space trips from Earth to the Moon and from Earth to Mars.

You need to send a few prostitutes and gigolos as part of the crew and wake them up if there is an emergency like in this film.

Our male passenger gets lonely and eventually decides to wake up a female passenger.

He checks the entire ship and eventually chooses the lovely Aurora Lane played by Jeniffer Lawrence. She is a writer.

Clearly, he was paying attention in high school and he knows about the unfair advantages of monopolies like AT&T and Standard Oil.

His plan is clever and extremely simple at the same time. He is going to wake her up and she is going to eventually fall in love with him. They are going to get married. They are going to have children. They are going to be happy for the rest of their lives and eventually, they are going to die.

Keep in mind this guy is not an engineer and he cannot simply repair his sleeping pod and get back to sleep for the next 90 years.

Clearly, you need to send at least two engineers with the required knowledge to repair a sleeping pod on every spaceship and wake one of them if there is an emergency.

I understand there is no movie if our villain simply calls the emergency hotline and says "I am awake" and they send an engineer to repair the sleeping pod but this could be easily fixed if one of the asteroids destroys part of the section of the ship where the crew is sleeping killing both engineers in the first five minutes of the film.

I believe there should be some sort of law enforcement on the ship and if one of the sleeping pods is accidentally waking up one of the passengers then the police officers, bodyguards, or security guards should be awake to make sure nobody messes with the rest of the passengers.

One awake passenger is bad enough.

One awake passenger murdering other passengers is a public relations nightmare for the transportation company.

I am not a lawyer but I believe you are murdering a passenger if you wake her up ahead of schedule during a space trip.

Therefore, this guy is technically an extremely dangerous murderer and we should be prepared for this scenario from a legal standpoint.

Maybe the computer can release some sort of gas if he tries to open another sleeping pod and left him unconscious and the robocops can lock him in a cell.

We need to keep the crew and the rest of the passengers safe somehow.

This film is still playing on more than 215 movie theaters within the United States of America as of 02/14/2017.

I strongly suggest you watch this film in 3D. Travel to a bigger city if you must.

If you are reading this article in the near future and this movie is not available in a movie theater near you anymore then you should get a 3D TV if you don't have one already.

The $27.99 version of the film includes three discs: A regular Blu-Ray Disc, A 3D Blu-Ray Disc, and a higher-resolution Ultra HD disc (4K)

You can resell the regular Blu-Ray Disc on eBay for a few dollars and recover some of your original $27.99 investment.

If you want to receive this film for free then all you have to do is acquire at least 156 Sony shares and hold them for at least a year and your dividends will cancel your $27.99 purchase on Best Buy or whatever.

You don't have to spend any money on movies anymore. You can get all of them for free if you are smart and if you follow my lead.

If you like science fiction and adventure then you are probably going to enjoy this movie.

I am very pleased with this film.

I hope they make another one. I have a lot of ideas for a sequel and Jon Spaihts probably has a few of them as well.

I don't think he should write the screenplay for the sequel by himself. Maybe they should hire Damon Lindelof, Scott Derrickson or C. Robert Cargill to help him out.

He wrote the 2011 science fiction thriller The Darkest Hour, the 2012 science fiction film Prometheus, the 2016 superhero film Doctor Strange, and also The Mummy coming this June 9, 2017.

He may or may not be writing as we speak the screenplays for the Van Helsing and Cube remakes.

Conclusion

Emmy Award nominee Neal H. Moritz, Stephen Hamel, Michael Maher, and Ori Marmur did a fantastic job as the producers and they made a good science fiction adventure film.

I think all the Academy Award winner Jeniffer Lawrence, Academy Award nominee Lawrence Fishburne, and Chris Pratt fans all over the world will be extremely pleased.

I know that I am not writing for Rotten Tomatoes but I am rating this film with a FRESH TOMATO anyway.