[The Lone Ranger]

Passengers: the movie had a lot of potential, but never really lived up to it.


Here's a brief synopsis, with no real spoilers (most of this can be gleaned from the trailer). Chris Pratt plays a passenger (Jim) on a spacecraft that's on a journey to a distant world. The projected journey time is 120 years, so the passengers and crew are all kept in suspended animation for the duration of the trip. Something goes wrong and Jim's pod malfunctions. He wakes up and discovers that they're only 30 years into the journey, and so he faces the prospect of spending his entire life alone. All. Alone.

He manages to survive on his own for a year before he's reached the point of suicidal despair. Then he has an idea. He hates himself for doing it, but he simply can't survive on his own any longer -- so he opens the pod containing Jennifer Lawrence's character (Aurora).


Now, there's a lot to work with here. Jim's plight is compared to that of a drowning man: he knows that he's doing a terrible thing to Aurora, but he's desperate. And just as a drowning man might drown someone else in a desperate attempt to save himself, Jim has, in his desperation, condemned Aurora to live her entire life with only Jim for company.

So, does the film really explore this? Was Jim's action in any way forgivable? How will Aurora react when she finds out what he did to her? Unfortunately, we don't really get into those issues, because the movie quickly turns into a standard "We must save the ship, against incredible odds" flick.


Anyway, Chris Pratt was fine, and Jennifer Lawrence was as wonderful as ever. But both of them were wasted in a movie that could have been so much better.



Aside from the wasted potential, the wildly inconsistent physics bugged me. Sometimes, it was clear, they actually put some thought into the physics of the ship and how it would function -- and then they'd throw all of that right out the window in the very next scene. Ugh!


For example, the ship is shown to rotate, and that that's how it generates gravity. Okay, good. Then there's a power failure, and everything inside the ship suddenly goes zero-G. What? The ship wouldn't stop rotating just because the power failed!

I have a sneaking suspicion that the writers of the movie were thinking, "In 'serious' space movies, like 2001, spaceships always rotate, so our ship should rotate." Unfortunately, they didn't understand why ships rotate in "serious" space movies.


And you can't have it both ways! Why does practically every space movie misunderstand Newton's laws of motion? What I mean by that is this: Why is it that in practically every space movie, when the artificial gravity fails, objects (including people, of course) immediately leap off the floor, float to the center of the room -- and then stop?

You can't have it both ways: either a force is acting on those objects or it isn't! If there is a force acting on these objects, causing them to leap up off the floor and into the air, then they'll remain in motion until something exerts an opposing force on them -- that is, when they run into the ceiling or the wall, or whatever they're moving toward.

If there isn't a force acting on these objects, they won't leap off the floor and into the air, and they certainly won't come to a halt once they reach the center of the room.

Come on, this isn't even high school-level physics; it's grade school-level physics!

Why do movie makers so consistently fail to correctly depict how objects would behave in zero gravity?


Yes, Newton's laws still work, even in zero gravity. So, if you happen to find yourself in a pool when the gravity fails -- you can still swim. All you have to do is the same thing you do when the gravity is working: that is, if you push the water backwards, it generates a reaction force which pushes you forwards. So Aurora shouldn't have had any problem escaping from the pool in zero gravity -- even if it was floating in the center of the room for some mysterious reason.