Passengers (2016)

  This is one of those movies that's all right up until about the last fifteen minutes and then it's awful.

Jim (Chris Pratt) wanted a new life, so he signed up for a 120-year journey to a new planet, Homestead II, along with 4999 other people.  A malfunction in the ship's computer causes his hyper sleep chamber to wake him up ninety years too early.  He can't get to the ship's crew or the control center of the ship.  He can't go back to sleep in the hyper sleep chamber.  His only company is an android bartender (Micheal Sheen) and the vastness of space.  After being totally alone for a year, Jim almost literally stumbles across the sleep chamber of Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence), a writer who volunteered to go to Homestead II to write a story about the colonists, then return on another 120-year journey to Earth.  Jim makes the decision to wake Aurora up so that he will have a companion.

We'll explore that a little further in the piece.

Aurora adjusts to the news that she will likely never see Homestead II and she and Jim settle in to their relationship.  But things keep going wrong with the ship, leading to critical malfunctions all over.  The couple must find the root cause before a catastrophe occurs.

Okay.  From here, there might be some spoilers specifically regarding the ending.  You've been warned.

Let's talk about the flagrant consent issues first.  Here's Jim, stranded all alone (essentially) on a ship with no hope of rescue.  He has 4999 people he could choose from to help him a) get back to sleep or b) wake up the crew and figure out what went wrong.  He has access to the passenger profiles so he can get really good information on who is going to be the most useful.  And who does he pick?  Not an engineer.  Not a computer systems expert.  The beautiful, blonde writer.   Which, yes, as a writer, I can totally approve of because writers are awesome.  However, of the skill sets provided, that is not the most useful.  Which Jim knows.  By the time he has made this decision, he has given up on hope of rescue and just wants a companion to live out his days with.  He made a conscious decision to wake this woman up to serve that purpose and only that purpose.  And that's wrong.  Medieval fairy tales wrong.  Rape of the Sabines wrong.

Here's something else fun.  Jim is a regular class passenger.  He uses his ID bracelet to get food, a room, clothes, and sundries from the ship.  Aurora is a gold class passenger.  Her ID bracelet gets a marked difference in quality of the same goods.  Because let's perpetuate existing class distinctions on our way to a shiny new utopia.

Here's where we talk about the ending.

After all the drama over Aurora finding out that Jim deliberately woke her, and being angry over what is assuredly the world's most drawn-out murder, Jim presents her with an option to return to sleep after all, but only her, leaving him to die alone on the ship after living out his entire lifespan.  And she decides to stay awake with him.  So when the rest of the ship wakes up, Aurora has left them a written record of the time she and Jim have had, and also turned the main open deck into a tropical jungle.

Yes.  It's Adam and Eve in space.  We're supposed to believe that in ninety years, these two people just said "fuck it, this is where we live now.  Let's make the best of it," and just did whatever the hell they wanted without ever trying to wake anyone else up.  They never got bored of each other and wanted someone else to talk to.  They never had a fight where one said, "I want a divorce," and decided to go pick another spouse from the remaining passengers.  They never had children.  Can you imagine if they did?  Talk about class war.  And, really, following the source material, what should have happened was that they had two sons, one of whom was totally on board with just being a caretaker to these sleeping innocents and one of whom resented them for their suspended animation, ultimately attempting to wake them up and killing his brother instead, for which crime he is jettisoned into space in an escape pod.

But hey, maybe you like this kind of thing.  Space Genesis!  Starring Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence.  Knock yourself out.