Taking a ride with Passengers

     We got to see the new space opera Passengers recently. We've had a bit of time to reflect and think on the film and the fact that we've done so often is a clear sign that we were impressed.

     The movie is visually stunning and the story is compelling, the main characters play out a spectacularly intricate dance of emotional turmoil on a wonderfully fleshed out sci-fi set piece. Our space-fairing humans are aboard a massive ship designed to take people to new habitable worlds, seed them with life and terraform them to create new homes for humanity, but our protagonists have woken up a little (lifespan) early. The rocket ark these people are "alone" aboard is an exquisitely detailed craft, it almost seems like someone found this spectacular ship design and wrote a story around it, with it as a character as powerful as the hotel in The Shining (and sporting a non-living bartender too!). Not to say the ship is haunted, this isn't another Event Horizon affair; the function and design have a clear impact on the story though. The set pieces were designed with a slight nod to sleek retro futurism and a bit of Art Deco for flavor. The classic sci-fi tropes of food dispensers in the cafeteria and little cleaner/fixer bots roaming the halls was a welcome sight as well. I always love a robot; good help is hard to find. To get to the meat and potatoes of our thoughts though we need to get to spoiler territory, where no man has gone before.

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The concepts of this movie were an excellent way to pit man against environment with an entirely man-made environment. A cascading ship malfunction on a tightly designed ship is brilliant and realistic impetus for the plot to get moving. Some of the most interesting discussions this movie has sparked revolved around the access system which grants/restricts access to various parts of the ship using an automated ID system, and how this affects our protagonists' lives. But the part that we keep coming to, the point of contention, is the end, or if it even was one. After many conversations we started to realize that the ending of this movie, while poetic and beautiful has brought up a much larger question of the fate of those on-board. Here's the big one guys... the ship still doesn't arrive at it's destination by the end of the movie... this left us wondering, will there be a sequel? We hope not since that will probably just go poorly regardless of the talents attached, it's just the way it is in sci-fi, sometimes you have to leave questions unanswered. That being said. maybe a story of another one of these ships reaching its destination and what awaits travelers there. But I keep wondering if the things done on the ship during their time alive before the other passengers awoke, may have put the other passengers in a less than advantageous position. 2 people consuming a limited amount of food for years instead of days, creating a greenhouse garden of Eden in a concourse of a working flying space ship...it raises a lot of questions. Maybe they'll be answered someday, maybe they won't.

Arrival Review

We finally got to see Arrival. We were not disappointed.

We've been wanting to see the new Sci-fi flick "Arrival" since we first saw the trailers. The combination of a unique plot and some powerful alien imagery had us appropriately excited, but we still weren't sure where this film would dare to take us. The journey ended up being very cerebral and just a little bit surreal. Our greatest thrills in the film came from the aliens and their ship(s); the design work there was brilliant. The crux of the film which has been teased in the trailer, the hidden win for every xenobiologist and real space exploration geek, is that rather than reach for the easy plot fix and busting out the universal translation device, the main character is charged with translation. How do you start talking with a thing you share nothing in common with?

The film approaches this brilliantly with a beautifully complex alien written language. The movie has a timely message about the underpinnings of communication, and how the languages we speak can influence the way we see the world. The latter is a scientific theory that has been gaining tremendous steam in social sciences. While we would love to have gotten a glimpse of an alien home world, we were just as happy to experience an alien view of ours. While "Arrival" did a spectacular job of taking a harder look at how a first encounter could play out, we did have to take an insulin shot for the emotional aspect of the plot, that was just too sweet, but there has to be something for people who don't get excited for a pure science movie.