Hacker Cinema
Passengers
2016 · Film · 116 min
Directed by Morten Tyldum
A spacecraft traveling to a distant colony planet and transporting thousands of people has a malfunction in its sleep chambers. As a result, two passengers are awakened 90 years early.
5 positive3 negative3 mixed7 neutralfrom 18 commenters
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19 comments on Hacker News
It’s a smaller movie, given the talent involved, but very interesting. The controversy undermined the viability of its popular legacy.
Kind of like Passengers (half kidding, but the controversy on this one always felt like an inadvertent bend of timeliness).
The Thomas attractor reminds me of the ship in the film Passengers.
Some that haven’t been mentioned yet: Matinee, The First Great Train Robbery, Dave, Ghibli movies (Laputa, Mononoke, Totoro, Kiki, …), Mad Max 2, Nightmare Before Christmas, Edge of Tomorrow, Tremors, Godzilla Minus One, Watchmen, The Fly, Dark City, Passengers, Predestination, Strange Days, WarGames, Tron, Timecrimes, Sneakers, The Frighteners.
> Some big hollywood production like for example Passengers where there are barely more than three actors visible in the whole film.
I agree with your general comment but in Passengers it was really central to the overall plot and premise. It's not a good example of this phenomenon.
I don't think this was drive for budgetary reasons, that film clearly had a huge budget looking at the visuals.
As for money, Hollywood should be much less dependent on 'A-listers' and tap unknown talent. This will also make the 'A-listers' cheaper and stop this annoying thing where you see the same faces in every movie, often cast more for the name than for best fit to the role.
> Some movies just seem so empty, and they look "cheap" if you see it in this angle. Some big hollywood production like for example Passengers where there are barely more than three actors visible in the whole film.
Maybe that's true, but for Passengers, no extras is an integral part of the movie plot. Anything else would make 0 sense.
And they pulled it off rather well.
Another aspect of this is staffing. It doesn't immediately seem tech related, but it is.
There's less people in the background as extras, less people making background scenes or setting up. It can mostly filled in by production technology if necessary.
Some movies just seem so empty, and they look "cheap" if you see it in this angle. Some big hollywood production like for example Passengers where there are barely more than three actors visible in the whole film. I've noticed there's a lot of these hollow/empty productions with very few actual actors visible, and they are rather lifeless.
Interesting. Passengers also had at least one fairly nonsensical effect scene and some plot points that just didn't make sense. But, yeah, with some fairly modest changes it could IMO have been a notably better film. For me, it's definitely in the category of films that are frustratingly close to having all of the ingredients but doesn't pull them together properly.
The Circle is another one. If ever a film called out for a satirical take on its source material, it was that one.
There are very few sci-fi movies or books where relativity is important and they treat it seriously. Tau Zero is one, I'm not sure about Time for the Stars, but Forever War does have FTL.
I created a list of all these works I could find a few years ago. Here is one link:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/discussion.php?id=l6q90mvssgscsj5arqe8umjb
I think this is a complete list of the films and tv series:
- The Star Lost - Pandorum - Passengers (2016)
The character is super creepy anyway. Passengers is essentially Stockholm Syndrome: The Movie.
When passengers ends, if feels like a cheap-o movie. Hollywood but with only two main actors and in total three actors for the whole film. So empty, no ensemble, no people. Only the two actors, production, special effects and the movie making machine.
I would like to marry a Neanderthal woman and make a baby with her.
I would much rather do that than go to Mars with SpaceX.
I know it isn't lawful to create a Neanderthal woman from the Neanderthal genomes that we have already sequenced, but if it was, I would like to try it.
If I knew someone in a lab who had access to the technology, I would ask them to undertake this project with me in secret.
I know this is controversial, but something kind of similar happened with Jennifer Lawrence in the movie Passengers and she ended up falling in love with the guy.
If you want to feel like someone in the movie Passengers Naypyitaw on a national holiday is an awesome place to do it. There is this vast swaths of infrastructure working and rarely a soul to see. Build for 20 million with barely one living there.
Amazing place, amazing people (when you get to find them) and amazing food.
Annihilation, Dark City, Riddick Chronicles, Babylon A.D., Guardians of The Galaxy, Fast and Furious, Hummingbird, Transporter, Crank, Hardcore Henry, Revolver, Lucy, Ghost in The Shell, Now you see me, Passengers, Transcendence, Maze Runner, Limitless...
I think we've had a good run; I also think it's easy to be biased and not see it because of some nostalgia-effect of sorts. If you are f.e. 30+ you might more easily dismiss a movie as Limitless or Lucy as uncredible; both are based on a common myth that we only utilize a low percentage of our brains capacity, as an example, so they are that: unrealistic. But I think that's an unfair comparison because of an inherent bias that when you think about a movie like The Matrix you don't see it with the same critical lens because you perhaps had less knowledge of the world in your earlier years. #JustAFewThoughts
That was a plot point in the movie "Passengers".
> No one has come close to solving recommendation.
What if it isn't solvable? To me it doesn't look like there is enough room to maneuver, at least not in things like movies and TV shows, I think in music there might be. Say a recommendation needs to fulfill the intersection of 2+ things the user likes to feel like a recommendation, for example "you watched space and romance movies, here's a romance in space" otherwise it's just "you watched some space movies, here are some more". I don't think there are enough movies in existence, especially once you apply common criteria like "isn't in a foreign language, isn't on another streaming service, isn't very old or low budget" for these intersections to be filled with more than one or two items. In the space romance example above, the sole example I'm aware of is Passengers, there may be one or two others but it's not enough that you aren't going to deplete the pool even watching casually.
That only leaves extrapolating completely new things I might like based on more general patterns, but that falls victim to the same issue. If you know that I liked Passengers (already difficult without explicit feedback, watched does not mean liked), you have no idea whether I liked it because it had Jennifer Lawrence in it, or because of the tone, or the presentation, or the theme, or any other facet of it. And I only watch tens or hundreds of movies, not the thousands or ideally millions necessary to isolate the fact that I like movies with one very particular tone very slightly more than other movies.
I attended a screening of Passengers that was followed by a QA with the writer afterward, and it was pretty uncomfortable at times.
He said he wrote the movie because he really wanted to explore the idea that sometimes people choose love even when it has hurt them--he used the example of people who get cheated on, yet stay with their partner and work it out.
But it became clear that he was so interested in this aspect of the movie that he just could not get perspective on the central violation of Jennifer Lawrence's character, which is truly horrific. Being awoken early, to spend your entire life on a spaceship you can't escape, by someone who wants to have sex with you... that's some pretty clear callouts to core human fears like slavery, claustrophobia, rape, etc.
A plot device that was just supposed to be an obstacle to love, is totally overpowering. Based on the questions, a lot of the audience couldn't get over it, me included, so the happy ending just felt forced, hollow, and unbelievable.
I take Passengers as a great example of why it might be good sometimes for studios to bring in someone new to rewrite a script. I think any good writer, coming to that script cold, would recognize the power of the core horror and start from there.
Passengers spent a while high on "The Black List," which is a consensus list of the best unproduced scripts in Hollywood. I wonder if that put the writer in a position to maintain more than the usual amount of control for a spec script.
That was one of the best film critiques I've ever seen. I especially like the fact that:
- the original movie was explained because I had never heard of it; and
- a short version of the re-edited movie was spliced together so that you could see what the author had in mind.
Overall, this is a compelling demonstration of how simply changing the order in which the viewer gets information can make a so-so story great.
Also, it makes me want to see both Passengers (even though it's supposed to be predictable) and Solaris (because it's not supposed to be).
> Yeah. The "mainstreaming" of sci-fi has been kind of a mixed blessing. We got all the PEW PEW PEW lasers and blinking computer lights but none of the thought-provoking stuff.
I'm inclined to agree with you, but then I also saw a couple of big Hollywood sci-fi movies this winter that were actually thought-provoking.
1. Arrival - adaptation of a really challenging short story. Drops most of the physics stuff, but keeps the linguistics, and the human element. Only adds a little action.
2. Passengers - lots of action, but centers around an ethical conundrum that will give you plenty to talk about afterwards.
Agree on the new Star Trek reboot. It really offers me nothing of what I like about Star Trek.
Forget the action movies and funny comedies, where are the sci-fi movies??? And I don't mean some stupid movie about a guy living in what appears to be the modern world sans display screens and talking to his earphone, I mean movies with spaceships (and especially spaceships with elaborate corridors). The 70s and 80s were chock full of these movies. And no shaky-cam back then either. So far, all we've had is Star Wars--blah (yet again, Hollywood milking an old franshise), and Prometheus in 2012 (again, milking an old franchise).
Supposedly we're going to get a few spaceship sci-fi movies this year, including "Passengers" which looks promising. But we've gone quite a long time now without much in the way of sci-fi.