“You can’t get so hung up on where you’d rather be, that you forget to make the most of where you are.” Amazingly inspirational quotes like this by crewmembers such as Aurora, coupled with love as stars float in the background helps make Passengers my new favorite space movie. The premise behind it may not have been impeccable, but the emotions the movie makes the watcher feel outweighs for some lack of planning.

To give some background my favorite space film before Passengers was Interstellar followed by the Martian. Being a space geek means that I want them grounded (ironically because we’re in space!) to real world scenarios and physics. Of course screenwriters need leeway to make a movie that really inspires, even though it doesn’t fit into physics as we know it. Passengers was great since it didn’t completely alter the real world while it still kept moviegoers on the edge of their seat with the amazing cinematography. The greatest example of this was the spacecraft, Avalon, that the two wanderers joined on for a ride to Homestead II. The Spacecraft didn’t fit the bulky description of most space faring vessels. It was slim, modern, and triangular, giving it an alien / futuristic feel. As for the physics of the craft to create artificial gravity they had the vehicle spinning. Most movies get artificial gravity wrong and they have too small a spacecraft for the spinning to create enough force to emulate 1G, but in Passengers the spacecraft was big enough and the cinematography showed it. On top of this the movie showed the most realistic way we will get to another star system. Humanity has a long way to go to reach the speed of light; the movie used a much more practical way of getting humans into other planetary realms than the scapegoat other movies use – wormholes. Passengers utilizes what our current space travel is going to be – traveling through space for hundreds of years until we finally reach our grand destination.

The biggest argument critics have with Passengers is that it’s a misogynistic movie that promotes the destruction of the female lead character. . This is simply not the case. The reason why she has to rely on him to do all of the technological repairs is not because she is dumb and needs the strong hands of a masculine man to do her work, but instead because electronics is not in her field of expertise. She’s an author. He’s a mechanical/electrical/technical engineer guru. Also he was the first one to wake up, so he has much more knowledge about the entire situation. Critics need to stop slandering this movie. It shows how isolation and love affect the human condition. I would not go as far as to say it’s Shakespearean (Many scholars believe reading Shakespeare enlightens us into the human condition), and fundamentally shows us the human condition – but it’s not that far a stretch.

In the end the movie was spectacular. It may start a bit slow, but the development of the plot and how the characters react was just so intriguing. As for those who thought it was atrocious – hopefully they realize the true thesis of the movie – how love can make the heart ascend.