Are we passengers or captains of our own ship?

Fate, free will, and making the best of where we are.

Hello everyone, it’s good to be back after a couple of weeks.

I’ve decided to try something new for the month of May, and that is to do an exploration of themes utilising films for the entire month – loosely dubbed, “Movie Month of May, however uncreatively haha.

The schedule and rough ideas for general discussion are as follows:

2nd May – “Passengers” – Ethics and ethical questions, life and death, solitude or social, together or alone, fate/destiny, free will vs determinism.

9th May – “Catch Me If You Can” – The results of broken families, chasing what you can't/didn't have, misdirected energy.  

16th May – “Match Point” – What if the bad guy won? Why it can't be so, bad guy always has a weakness which is some character flaw in him, influence of Dostoevsky’s Crime & Punishment, the opposite of hero mythology.

23rd May – “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood”, “Inglourious Basterds” & “Ford vs Ferrari” – Capturing the essence, it’s not so much about ultimate or factual truth but capturing the spirit, the vibe, the essence, the feel of a time period or event. Influence of Plato and the essence of things.

30th May – “The Shawshank Redemption & The Green Mile” – The power of the human soul, the strength/resilience of the individual, exploring the human condition, unlikely friendships and the impact people can have on our lives.

A life amongst the stars - Photo by Aldebaran S on Unsplash.

So, let’s begin with the 2016 film “Passengers” starring Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt. Interstellar or deep space travel has been a twinkle in the eye of man ever since he laid eyes on the stars, and been a feature of literature and film for eons. However, the reality kind of stopped since we landed on the moon and we seemed content with putting some satellites and space stations within Earth’s orbit and some deep space probes, but that’s about it. Although, there has been a renewed sense of interest to colonise/occupy Mars led by SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk, in part due to our adventurous and conquering nature, but also due to the environmental degradation and climate change concerns facing Earth and a possible need to relocate.

The movie paints the picture that this kind of space travel is done (and has been done) thousands of times and that there’s essentially another Earth, marketing it as both a necessity for those with skills, and a wealthy luxury for those seeking adventure and novelty – for which we have both characters in Jim (Pratt) and Aurora (Lawrence). Conquering “the final frontier” has long had appeal, but the case could be made if we put those resources and minds to work here on Earth instead how much better would we be or did all this desire for exploration, combined with the research and development, benefit us here on the ground?

Before we move on to the bigger ethical questions in the movie, I just want to briefly posit the idea of the two realities of this kind of space travel or interstellar relocation; the friends and family you leave and never see again, and the idea of returning to Earth some 250 years after you left and how the hell you’d re-adjust to that. While both characters have elements of the former, Aurora is doing it primarily for the latter – to experience life in a space colony for a year and write about before returning home. Jim sees himself as kind of obsolete in the current world and wants to build/create something new and fresh as a mechanical engineer.

Earth and humanity…I couldn’t begin to imagine what it would be like 250 years from now and how me as I’m currently constructed would do with the sheer contrast. I mean, we find it difficult to relate to human beings sometimes only 5-10 years different from ourselves, how are you going to bridge the gap of a couple of centuries? Surely, you’d be isolated and considered a freak. You wouldn’t have any one who could relate to you. And with leaving your family and friends behind, it’s not like you’ve moved city or interstate or even overseas, you’ve relocated to another time and place. No one can visit you, everyone you knew would be dead probably 50 years before you arrived at the new colony, so you’d be looking at videos of them “like it was yesterday” because for you it would feel like that, but your brain would try to reconcile that it isn’t – really disorientating.

Anyway, enough of the talk about time and space, onto the more nitty gritty. Sadly, Jim doesn’t realise his dream as his pod malfunctions and wakes him up 90 years before arrival, essentially condemning him to die aboard the ship before ever making it to the colony. Such a deterministic fate is difficult to swallow and we get to see the various phases dealing with such a reality check – shock, despair, hope for solution, hopelessness, hedonism/escapism, denial, madness, loneliness, suicidal ideation, panic…before fate plays its part again. Fate is a continual theme across the entire movie (along with learning how to make the best of where you are); tripping on the bottle he threw away as he’s running back in from nearly ejecting himself into space, stumbling across Aurora’s pod.

Human beings are social creatures, we need interaction, most of us wouldn’t last a month let alone a year in isolation – we saw this during the pandemic – and yet Jim managed a little over a year before Aurora…*coughs* comes along. As we saw with numerous scenes, the human mind will try anything to stop itself from going insane, but there is only so much one can do in isolation with no help coming over the hill (or around the meteor). You’re totally alone. You don’t know what happened or why, and the nearest response is 55 years away from Homestead customer service. Just imagine that for a second. Even working out what went wrong with your pod – being a mechanical engineer has some perks – wouldn’t really bring you any comfort, it would merely keep the mind occupied for a period of time. I mean, I love my solitude, but the reality of spending the rest of my life without a single interaction from another human is devastating. There’s nothing normal about this entire venture, these are extraordinary circumstances, even if nothing went wrong. Could you go the rest of your life floating on a spaceship in the middle of nowhere surrounded by 5,000 other people you could never interact with and just live out the years alone? The setting, I find, really heightens the isolation; you’re in deep space on something akin to a ghost ship with an android bartender as your only lifelike communication. It would be enough to drive anyone completely mad, spiral and no longer see a point to life.   

To overcome his despair, Jim becomes incredible fond of Aurora, redirecting his energy into more positive areas by reading up about her, listening/watching the audio and video recordings of her as he becomes more interested in who she is. Jim begins to converse with her and even starts to have breakfast next to her hibernation pod – essentially, she is a proxy for his social interaction (which was non-existence), a cure for his loneliness and a reason for him to keep on living. Jim gets to the point where he can’t stop thinking about her, so he foolishly tries to stop, no matter how futile it is. Now we come to the most ethically challenging decision of the film.

In space no one can hear your existential crisis - Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash.

I asked you before “could you live alone on this ship for the rest of your life?”, because to me that is the fundamental question of the film. With all that it encompasses. Now, whereas with Jim it was beyond his control that he woke up i.e. a deterministic action. However, he deliberately wakes up Aurora – condemning her to the same fate as he – it is a direct and conscious act out of free will. Jim stewed over this for months and still feels regret, shame and guilt after doing so as he comes to realise the true weight of his decision. He quite literally hides the truth from Aurora, choosing to keep the narrative of “same as me”, that it was an accident, in order to suppress the negative emotions associated with his decision…and because no one would be too happy to be woken up 90 years too soon, I imagine.

Jim’s motives aren’t honest, and his decision still hangs over him (rightfully so), both burdening him and Aurora. She goes through similar feelings to him, but at least she has someone to walk her through, bring her up to speed, bounce off of and ameliorate her emotions. The situation binds them, not the first time an extreme situation has brought people together, and they end up growing quite close together despite how different they are and unlikely as a pairing.

However, like this whole journey, even the best laid plans can go horribly pear-shaped. Aurora eventually finds out that Jim woke her up and has an emotional breakdown (completely understandable) – as one does when they find out their whole world was a lie – with the realisation that this wasn’t fate, but his choice, and that he robbed her of her adventure/life, just as she was coming to accept the situation/her fate. To paraphrase some of the Aurora’s dialogue, “we have dreams…we plan our future…that we’re captains of our fate, but we’re passengers and go where fate takes us”, and for first time in her life she doesn’t feel alone. Ironically, she saved his life, but he took her life in a sense, at least at this moment that is the prevailing feeling.

Ideally, it would take an incredibly long time, but possibly never, that the two would ever speak, but once again the aforementioned themes and extreme circumstances never truly leave. As the ship continues to break down, another pod malfunctions and one of the crew, Gus, (played by Laurence Fishburne) is woken up, which, as it turns out, is quite necessary for a number of reasons. Jim and Aurora can only avoid each other for so long before fate once again dictates action and they have to work together to save the ship and its inhabitants and, more importantly, reconcile their feelings towards each other with the help of Gus – as is usually the case with such a cataclysmic event, you kind of need a third party to facilitate healing a psychological and emotional wound of that magnitude, someone not directly nor emotionally involved. I feel I’m at risk here of just retelling the plot, but some of it is relevant and necessary to the entire discussion. Gus categorises Jim as “the drowning man will always try and drag someone down with him” and how much he’s struggling which I think ends up eliciting some empathy from Aurora for Jim going a whole year without anybody – and as it turns out if all three weren’t woken up the entire fate of everyone onboard would be lost, but once again that’s not known at the time, such is the nature of fate.

Gus dies (due to the way he came out of hibernation) and I think this acts as another bind together for Jim and Aurora to work together and solve the immediate and life threatening problem. Both end up risking their lives to save each other (and the entire ship), illustrating how much it really is our relationships with other people, particularly that of an intimate partner, that bring us the most meaning in our lives. Even with a chance to go back into hibernation – Jim comes clean about the auto-doc’s ability to “stop” the human body, but it’s only for one – she still chooses to keep on living, knowing full well what it means. Aurora makes her choice out of free will this time and forgoes her original adventure for this new one.

Jim was prepared to spend the rest of his life back in solitude (with Aurora re-hibernating), but that would have been a hell of a decision for anyone to make let alone Aurora in that situation, to knowingly leave someone to die alone given what has happened, perhaps even in spite of what happened. No doubt, Aurora wouldn’t have wanted to burden Jim with that kind of conclusion to life (despite what he did to her in the beginning) and she came to her own conclusion that spending the rest of her life onboard this ship with him was of greater life satisfaction than what she originally set out to do. Neither really wanted to live alone and apart from the other because that reality is terrifying and soul-deadening. It ties back to my earlier point about how (in undertaking this journey) she wouldn’t have anyone who could relate to her (when she returned home), and the only people (or in this case, person – Jim) who could truly empathise and understand her and her story would have been dead a long time ago – and I’m not sure she wanted that even though she was originally okay with that idea when she set off.

This “hell of a life”, making the most/best of where you are, making a beautiful life together, is where the discovery that it’s in our relationships with others that life’s true meaning is found. In essence, the philosophical principle of “Amor Fati” or the love of fate – which was espoused most notably by Nietzsche and the Stoics – is the key takeaway of the film in my opinion.

Thank you for making it this far, I appreciate it. What are your thoughts? What decisions would you have made? How would you have dealt with such a fate? Do you have any feedback for me? I hope to see you next week for the next film thematic exploration.

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