Here's a Detailed Plot Description of Passengers That Should Prevent You From Ever Having to See Passengers
EntertainmentLet me get this out of the way: Passengers is bad. Beyond the horrific, misogynistic setup that attempts to make Stockholm Syndrome sexy, the movie (which has been in development hell for the better part of a decade) is just plain dull. Everything about it—from the easy casting of its titular lovebirds, to the cobbled-together set design of its ship, to its yawn-inducing set pieces—is uninspired. The trailers for Passengers famously (to me) didn’t know how to sell it, because Passengers is a movie that doesn’t know what it wants to be. A romcom or a sci-fi thriller? Campy or serious? It doesn’t even have the good sense to be a bad movie that’s fun to watch, it’s just a movie you can’t wait to escape. So instead of seeing Passengers this weekend, save yourself the money (and frustration) and just read this detailed plot summary of Passengers instead.
Spoilers ahead. (Duh.)
We begin on the Avalon. It’s a futuristic ship modeled after futuristic ships we’ve seen in better movies that’s 30 years into its 120-year journey to a recently colonized planet called Homestead II—which is a lot like Earth, only with a Yosemite National Park clone stamped all over the entire thing. While hurtling through the usually empty vacuum of space at the speed of, oh, let’s say sound, the Avalon oopsies its way through an asteroid belt that its fancy fusion-powered shields is unable to properly… shield. So the alarm bells go off and a big daddy asteroid plows into the Avalon and busts the most important parts of the ship just enough to cause a single hibernation pod (out of over 5,000) to malfunction. The man assigned to the newly busted pod is named Jim (Chris Pratt). Jim is a mechanic who longs for the good old days when men fixed broken stuff instead of robots fixing stuff, the stuff fixing itself, or just dumping the broken stuff and buying new stuff. I don’t understand this particular character trait, as this movie is set too far into the future for Jim to plausibly remember a time when humans were needed to fix stuff by hand, but hey, I’m no screenwriter.
When Jim wakes up, he is confused. Where is everyone? Why is the only person I can talk to a robot bartender played by Michael Sheen? Oh, he realizes, the pod broke and woke him up 90 years too soon. And whoops, the pods were thought to be failsafe and cannot be re-entered. Basically, he’s doomed to die on this ship well before anyone else wakes up. After grappling with this harsh reality, Jim asks the robot bartender for advice. The robot bartender says something like, “I don’t know, enjoy your time on the ship while you can.” It is here that the contemporary remix of that Elvis song “A Little Less Conversation” begins playing. Yes, that version you’re thinking of. Jim plays a Dance Dance Revolution ripoff with some holograms, wolfs down food from the ship’s fanciest restaurants, and stops shaving. After roughly one year of montaging, Jim decides that the ship’s many delights are no fun when alone. So he wanders into the spacewalk chamber and contemplates having a little less conversation, and a little more suicide. Unable to pull the trigger (or, in this case, a push a button that opens a hatch that would suck him out into space), Jim returns to the room filled with hibernation pods, trips on an empty liquor bottle, and falls at the foot of a pod inhabited by a woman named Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence). After looking at her sleeping, might-as-well-be-dead face, he becomes hornier than he’s ever been. This is the Passengers idea of a meet-cute.
After looking Aurora up in the passenger log (she’s a writer), watching some videos of her explaining why she’s traveling to Homestead II (she wants to write about it), and reading everything she’s ever written (literacy is sexy), Jim decides to break her hibernation pod so the two of them can fuck until they die. Then, presumably after masturbating, he decides not to. But then he gets horny again and thinks, “Fuck it! I’ll wake her up and tell her it was an accident!” Because he is a filthy misogynist AND an idiot, he tells the robot bartender his plan and asks him to keep it a secret. So off Jim goes to Aurora’s pod. He twists a phillips-head, crosses a few crossed wires, and ZAP! She’s awake, and (fingers crossed!) ready to fuck.
Jim meets her and is like, “Hey. Pod break?”
She’s like, “Yeah. What’s up with that?”
He’s like, “I dunno, happens sometimes I guess.”
She’s like, “When are we landing? Soon?”
He’s like, “Nah, 88 years. Sucks.”