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Review: Two ‘Passengers’ Trapped on a Spaceship Find Love Amid Despair

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By Stephen Holden

• Dec. 20, 2016

There is a blazing light at the center of the interplanetary romance “Passengers,” and its name is Jennifer Lawrence. In a love story whose attempt to be an interstellar “Titanic” eventually falls flat, Ms. Lawrence’s character, Aurora, is an ambitious journalist aboard the Avalon, a commercial spacecraft making a historic 120-year voyage. Its destination is Homestead II, a pioneer colony of an overcrowded Earth. The spunky, whip-smart Aurora, who bought a round-trip ticket, hopes to write the first book about Homestead II upon her return to New York.

But when Aurora is prematurely roused from a state of suspended animation, her hopes are dashed. Her awakener, Jim (Chris Pratt), is a hunky mechanical engineer who is jolted back to consciousness when an asteroid hits the Avalon and is aghast to find himself alone. Realizing that he faces 90 years of solitude on the spacecraft, can’t return to his hibernation pod and will never live to reach his destination, he begins to fall apart.

Spotting the recumbent Aurora, radiant in her pod, he savors her beauty, admires her thumbnail biography and falls in love. Against his better moral judgment, he revives her. Once outside her pod, Aurora is devastated to learn that she, like Jim, will almost certainly die en route to Homestead II.

But soon Jim and Aurora embark on a romantic courtship and quickly fall in love. Given their beauty, that may not sound bad until you consider their future in joint isolation with nothing to do but eat, drink, make love and play shadow games with holograms.

At its most gripping, “Passengers,” directed by Morten Tyldum ( “The Imitation Game” ) from a screenplay by Jon Spaihts (a collaborator on the scripts for “The Darkest Hour,” “Prometheus” and “Doctor Strange”), conveys the panic and despair of finding yourself trapped in a luxurious corporate prison in the middle of nowhere. Solitary confinement, even amid opulence, is solitary torture.

Even after “Passengers” ends, this creepy premise haunts your imagination. And the contrast between the chilly impersonality of the Avalon and the anguish of its human cargo lends the first half of the movie a desperate poignancy. Were I in Jim’s shoes, I would also drown my sorrows nightly the way he does at the well-stocked bar tended by a friendly android, Arthur (an amusing Michael Sheen).

Movie Review: ‘Passengers'

The times critic stephen holden reviews “passengers.”.

In “Passengers” Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt play hibernating travelers who wake up decades too early on a 120-year space journey. In his review Stephen Holden writes: At its most gripping, the film conveys the panic and despair of finding yourself trapped in a luxurious corporate prison in the middle of nowhere. Solitary confinement, even amid opulence, is solitary torture. Even after “Passengers” ends, this creepy premise haunts your imagination. And the contrast between the chilly impersonality of the space craft and the anguish of its human cargo lends the first half of the movie a desperate poignancy. But the film increasingly succumbs to timidity and begins shrinking into a bland science-fiction adventure whose feats of daring and skill feel stale and secondhand.

Their idyll abruptly ends when Arthur spills the beans to Aurora about Jim’s role in her awakening, and she explodes in a stunning fit of fury that is the movie’s dramatic high point.

In its more relaxed first half, “Passengers” allows room for needling satire of the airline industry. Depending on the ticket price, the 5,000 passengers can expect different levels of service once they’re revived in the journey’s final four months. As a “gold star” passenger, Aurora is entitled to a sumptuous breakfast, while Jim has to settle for cold cereal. We also learn that the corporation behind this space travel is a very successful operation.

Before its midpoint, the film begins its retreat from the moral questions raised by Jim’s selfishly dragging Aurora into his personal hell. He may be handsome and charming and mechanically adept, but he’s rather dull and inarticulate with no defined personality.

Aurora and Jim are the latest embodiments of Hollywood’s ever-evolving ideal of young lovers. Both are white and beautiful, with the likable Mr. Pratt suggesting a new-and-improved perfect specimen of a familiar jock type. It is Ms. Lawrence’s feisty wonder woman who warms the movie with her sizzling volatility and intelligence.

But “Passengers” increasingly succumbs to timidity and begins shrinking into a bland science-fiction adventure whose feats of daring and skill feel stale and secondhand.

Things briefly improve when another accidentally reawakened passenger, Gus (Laurence Fishburne), appears, and helps the couple figure out what’s wrong with the ship. But because his character is dying, his appearance amounts to little more than an extended cameo. It seems the asteroid strike set off the Avalon’s slow breakdown, and it is up to Jim, with Aurora’s help, to set things right, save them, and in the process redeem himself in her eyes.

In its haste to tie up loose ends as efficiently as possible, “Passengers” becomes a banal, formulaic pastiche of dozens of other like-minded space operas in which the human drama gives way to technological awe. And Ms. Lawrence’s light softens to a 40-watt glow. Except for one special effect, its action scenes are anything but awesome. None are more disappointing than the couple’s perfunctory, suspense-free spacewalks.

The one exception is a scene in which the gravity aboard the ship suddenly fails. Aurora is swimming when the water in the pool suddenly rises and she risks drowning inside an aquatic plume. Such delicious moments of movie magic are in painfully short supply.

Passengers Rated PG-13 for discreet sexuality, nudity and perilous action. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes.

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Jennifer Lawrence & Chris Pratt Wake up 90 Years too Early in 1st Passengers Trailer

Director Morten Tyldum’s Passengers is based on a delicious conceit; Two passengers (Jennifer Lawrence, Chris Pratt) aboard a spaceship awake from cryogenic sleep 90 years before anyone else. Tyldum is no stranger to mind-bending stories; he was the man behind 2014’s The Imitation Game , starring Benedict Cumberbatch as the father of the computer. 

While Turing’s story is a tragic one, the sci-fi romance of Passengers at least offers a chance for happiness. When Jim ( Chris Pratt ) and Aurora ( Jennifer Lawrence ) wake up before the thousands of others aboard their colony ship, they realized that they’re going to spend the rest of their lives together, just the two of them, on a ship that has everything they need save any other conscious passengers. When they start to fall in love, they become aware that their budding romance isn't just the stuff of cosmic luck; there's something wrong with the ship, and considering they're the only two people awake, it's up to them to fix it before everyone dies.

Jon Spaihts wrote the script, and despite the premise, there are indeed other fine actors in the film, including Michael Sheen as a robot bartender and Laurence Fishburne. 

Passengers  lands on December 21. 

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'Passengers' trailer: Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt find romance in space

With no star wars in sight, Passengers firmly focuses on being a sci-fi trek with romance, cool technology and two Hollywood stars lost in space.

Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt play a couple of space travelers who find attraction and action in the intergalactic tale (in theaters Dec. 21). Aurora (Lawrence) and Jim (Pratt) are among the 5,000-plus passengers resting in suspended animation on the Starship Avalon during a 120-year journey to the Homestead II space colony.

When their hibernation pods open 90 years too early, Aurora and Jim are left to explore the luxurious spaceship's high-end pools and huge dining rooms as they fall for each other — though more things go wrong and they have to work on saving their sleeping peers. Watch the trailer and see USA TODAY's exclusive photos from the film below.

Director Morten Tyldum, whose 2014 World War II drama The Imitation Game snagged him a best director Oscar nomination, had always wanted to do a massive sci-fi action movie but found more than that in  Passengers.

“It’s about what is important to live a happy, fulfilled life,” says the Norwegian filmmaker of the screenplay, written by Jon Spaihts ( Prometheus ). Plus, he adds, “it’s a romance, it’s a love story, it’s about forgiveness.”

Tyldum won’t reveal much about how his main characters’ relationship shakes out: “We want people to be surprised and live it when they get to the cinema.” But he allows that moviegoers will find Aurora and Jim an intriguing and charismatic duo from the start.

He’s a mechanic who wants to leave Earth and bought “the cheap ticket” for his space adventure, Tyldum says. She’s a writer from New York who's interested in cosmic travel but also “trying to get away from her past a little bit.”

Sneak peek: Unsung heroines at heart of 'Hidden Figures'

Lawrence and Pratt have a chemistry that results in a definite playfulness, Tyldum says.

“When you’re doing a love story, you’re most afraid that the actors playing the couple won’t like each other. But they became so close and work so well together,” the director says. “They have the same quick sense of humor and they’re both phenomenal actors, so there are sparks between them, which is what you want.”

Though it seems like a rather intimate film with just two people, the script is full of twists, says Tyldum, and flashbacks will show what happened before Aurora and Jim came aboard the Avalon. (The supporting cast includes Laurence Fishburne and Michael Sheen, who co-stars as a robot bartender named Arthur.)

Tyldum didn't want the look of Passengers  to place it in a certain era, instead combining familiar fashion with spacey stuff “to create a really unique and beautiful world,” he says. “You never think it’s far into the future. You feel like this movie can happen now, even if it can’t.”

CinemaCon: Chris Pratt drops the mic on J. Law's foot

The director promises a movie large in scale and boasts that “we have the coolest spaceship right after the Millennium Falcon.” Yet Tyldum wanted to emphasize character-driven emotional scenes over cold and distant sci-fi.

“You have to feel for these characters, you have to be with them, you have to cry with them, you have to be scared with them,” the director says. “You have to go on this roller coaster because that’s where the movie becomes interesting.”

• Entertainment
• Review: The Almost-Brilliant Sci-Fi Romance <i>Passengers</i> Runs Aground

Review: The Almost-Brilliant Sci-Fi Romance Passengers Runs Aground

Passengers is two-thirds of an amazing movie, a sci-fi romance that gives its heart away too early and doesn’t know what to do with itself after that. That’s a shame, because the deep-seated melancholy of the movie’s first third—and the idyllic, too-good-to-be true romantic bliss that flowers in the second—are rare, delicate qualities in the science fiction we’re getting these days. I’m afraid people will scoff at what they see as the silliness of Passengers even as they spend hours tripping over themselves to make a case for Rogue One as a deep, serious, anti-fascist film. (It is anti-fascist, but only in the most facile, uninteresting ways.)

But if the best science fiction is less about outer space than inner space—about the ways pushing out forces us to confront the most fearful and fragile parts of ourselves—then Passengers at least deserves a chance. The movie opens with a man waking up in a glass pod: Chris Pratt ’s Jim is a brawny mechanic who’s one of several thousand Earth people on their way to a distant planet, where they’ll start a new life. It takes a few hundred Earth years to get there, so everyone must sleep on the way. But a pod malfunction has caused Jim to wake up 90 years too soon. The poor guy went into hypersleep thinking he’d eventually awaken to a lively, bustling social life on the ship, a space-age ocean liner equipped with rec areas, an automat-style breakfast area, and a glamorous futuristic-retro art deco bar that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Chrysler Building circa 1935. Instead, Jim wakes up alone. It’s the bro-bummer of a lifetime.

So he wanders through the ship, trying to figure out how he might game the system and get back to sleep. Everything onboard is controlled by invisible, automated voices—there’s no real human in sight, and no real human voice within earshot. Jim tries to get answers to his many questions, but his pleas fall on deaf ears. It’s grimly funny very time he hears, “I didn’t understand that.” We’ve all been there.

There’s only one person for Jim to talk to, and he isn’t even a person. Arthur (a sleek, gleaming Michael Sheen ) is a painstakingly well-groomed android who looks, talks and listens like a bartender but who’s really only programmed to do so. Jim spends hours at the bar, pouring out his loneliness. He gets drunk a lot and wears ugly shorts all the time. He grows a fat, rounded, deeply unflattering Yukon Cornelius beard . This is what straight guys do without the (allegedly) civilized influence of women, and the movie is in on the joke. But if Jim’s mopiness is played partly for laughs, his despair is genuine. Pratt is a good enough actor to convey both, and when Jim goes for a lonely space walk—the ship is outfitted with special Buzz Lightyear-style suits for doing so—he’s both visibly overwhelmed by the wonder of the star-dotted velvet around him and wrecked with despair because there’s no one to share it with.

And then suddenly, somehow, Jim is no longer alone. There’s a girl he likes, a smart, funny writer named Aurora (just like the princess in Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty ), and she’s played by Jennifer Lawrence , who somehow looks more radiant than usual: Her face is a little fuller and softer—she’s like a baby Ellen Barkin. Aurora awakens early too, and Jim wins her heart, but only through an act of deception. At first, Aurora has trouble accepting that she’s doomed to live the rest of her life on a mostly deserted space ship. But she succumbs to the idea, and to Jim, too. The two go for a romantic space walk—at last, Jim has someone with whom to share the glory of space’s emptiness!—and try to kiss afterward. Their barrel-shaped suits keep them from getting too close, and they laugh. They’ve become an Adam and Eve for End Times.

The knowledge of Jim’s deceit tortures him, but he’s also happier than he has ever been. And if that’s not a great fainting couch on which to drape a science-fiction romance, what is? Passengers ’ director is Morten Tyldum (The Imitation Game) , working from a script by Jon Spaihts, and he vests much of the movie with a buzzing neon glow. (The space-walk scenes, contrasting glo-stick luminescence with inky blackness, are particularly beautiful.) But the movie runs aground in the last third: It’s as if Tyldum and Spaihts know they can’t get too wiggy, so they take a hard right and try to land their ship in more conventional territory.

Along the way they make what appears to be a failed attempt to channel the intense doomed romanticism of Brian De Palma’s Mission to Mars (specifically, the sorrowful and glorious scene in which astronaut Connie Nielsen fails to save her fellow astronaut husband, Tim Robbins). By that point, Tyldum has crashed his ship, figuratively speaking—inside this failed picture there’s a sicker, darker, more truthful one crying to get out. But for a while, Passengers is really going for something. The movie it might have been is lost in space, alone, never to be seen by mere mortals. All we can see from Earth are its few brightly burning scraps, but at least it’s something.

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'Passengers': An Interstellar Space Film in Pictures

Starship Avalon

The science fiction movie "Passengers" opens in theaters on Dec. 21, and tells the story of two people who wake up prematurely from hyper sleep during a 120-year journey to a distant planet.

Meeting New Friends

Jim (played by Chris Pratt) and Aurora (played by Jennifer Lawrence) meet for the first time on the Starship Avalon after waking up 90 years early.

Tech Friends

This action-thriller follows Jim and Aurora as they try to unravel the mysterious circumstances behind a malfunction that puts the ship on the edge of collapse. The bartender, an android, is their only other companion.

Aurora and Jim explore the spaceship and try to make the best of the situation as they attempt to understand what happened.

Looking for Answers

As they get closer to the truth, Aurora and Jim experience dangerous situations as things start to go wrong with the spacecraft.

Frightening Events

Using Skills

Jim tinkers with some of the onboard tech and creates a remote controlled camera.

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Making a Future

Jim asks Aurora to dinner.

On the Town

Romance blossoms between the two stranded space travelers.

Jim and Aurora get to know each other better at dinner with Arthur, the bartender, serving them drinks.

Unexpected Dangers

As problems continue to arise with the spacecraft, the gravity fails and Aurora is trapped in free floating water from the pool.

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Christine Lunsford joined the Space.com team in 2010 as a freelance producer and later became a contributing writer, covering astrophotography images, astronomy photos and amazing space galleries and more. During her more than 10 years with Space.com, oversaw the site's monthly skywatching updates and produced overnight features and stories on the latest space discoveries. She enjoys learning about subjects of all kinds. 

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Passengers Is Actually A Horror Movie

Surprise passengers is actually a terrifying movie.

The upside: He will be less lonely. The downside: He basically just committed murder.

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Movie Reviews

'passengers' has a first-class sci-fi premise, but the script flies coach.

Chris Klimek

A Wake-Up Call Comes 90 Years Early: Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt in Passengers . Columbia Pictures hide caption

A Wake-Up Call Comes 90 Years Early: Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt in Passengers .

Passengers, a fairy tale set aboard a luxury spaceliner, has billion-dollar ideas and five-cent guts.

The premise is marvelous: Jim, one of 5,000 pilgrims hibernating through the 120-year trip to the corporate settlement planet Homestead II, wakes up 90 years early when his cryo-pod breaks down. Returning to stasis is impossible, so he finds himself in a weird inverse of Matt Damon's dilemma in The Martian: With shelter and sustenance enough to die an old man, but condemned to run out the decades confined to a space Hilton with only a bromide-spouting robot bartender (Michael Sheen, winking his way into the Movie Android Hall of Fame) for company. Because Jim is played by Chris Pratt—who is handsome and charming but cannot convey doubt or fear—his existential pickle registers merely on a comic level.

After exhausting himself trying to break into the ship's bridge (the crew are all asleep, too) and beating back thoughts of suicide, Jim spies a sleeping beauty named Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence) in her pod. He looks her up in the ship's manifest. She's a writer — a crummy one, to judge by a sample she will later pronounce "some of the best work I've ever done." Undeterred, he reads her entire bibliography. Like Bill Murray wooing Andie MacDowell through trial-and-error in Groundhog Day, Jim has all the time he needs to become an Aurora expert (although Andie MacDowell was allegedly conscious in that movie). After spending months trying to talk himself out of it — or however long it takes to grow a caveman beard so phony it wouldn't score you a six-pack from a half-blind 7-Eleven clerk on prom night — Jim jimmies Aurora's capsule and wakes her up. Even though this means condemning her to share his fate: captivity and (near) solitude until death.

All of this? Is sticky and troubling and good.

And then, through the Sirius-level glow of Lawrence's presence, The Imitation Game director Morten Tyldum's diverting sci-fi drifts into more familiar but still pleasing romantic comedy turf as Jim and Aurora's preordained courtship proceeds a-space. Jim tells Aurora that her awakening, like his, was a fluke, but we're all waiting for the scene in which she discovers he stole her future because he couldn't stand to be alone. That is a dramatically rich sin, more than enough for one movie. Unfortunately, this one ladles other, less interesting sources of conflict on top of it.

The further dynamics of the plot are somewhat perishable. One or two are genuinely surprising. Too many of them seem inspired by the marketing department's mandate for an explosion they can put in the trailer. And there's the rub: Every time Tyldum rustles two sticks together long enough to get some sparks going (and these two beautiful actors never seem particularly hot for one another), the movie undermines itself with a howler of a line or, more often, a decision by one of the characters that makes no sense. It doesn't help that the exterior shots, intended to give us scale and grandeur, have a flat, screensaver-y look. Yes, of course Passengers relies on CGI to depict the yawning eternity of space. Gravity and Interstellar made their digital environs seem real; Passengers does not.

The script, by Jon Spaihts, has kicked around Hollywood for nearly a decade. (He also wrote Prometheus, another space-quest that opened grand and finished dumb.) It was nearly made a few years ago, on a substantially lower budget, and the first act is weird and strong enough to make you pine for the thriftier, thinkier iterations that might've continued its sardonic tack. (Danny Boyle's Sunshine and Duncan Jones' Moon were both cheaper, smarter entries in this genre.) Because Jim was riding in steerage, basically, as an indentured servant who will tithe the company a cut of his earnings for the rest his life, the ship's systems keep denying him the perks it's saving for the first class passengers when they wake up in 90 years. So he can have plain coffee but not espresso, and eat what looks like some kind of synthesized protein paste but nothing that looks like real food. There's also a clever bit where he tries to make a mayday call about his janky sleep-pod and is directed to Customer Service.

I wish the film had the integrity to hold its satiric bent, or, once it becomes a romance, to see its fable-logic through to the end. But Pratt and Lawrence are America's sweethearts now, and nothing must be permitted to harm them, and so shmoopy sentiment wills out. But in space, no can hear you scream, "You complete me."

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Passengers is 3 movies in one, each creepier than the last

Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt star in a glossy but ill-conceived space Titanic.

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Passengers isn’t one movie so much as three distinct movies stuck together with narrative duct tape that doesn’t quite cover the seams. One of those films is pretty good; one is uneven but sometimes charming; and one is downright bad, though its badness stems from its failure to adequately address issues raised by the other two.

Directed by Morten Tyldum ( The Imitation Game ) from a screenplay by Jon Spaihts ( Doctor Strange , Prometheus , and the upcoming Mummy reboot), the movie stars not one but both of America’s sweethearts: Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence . They are both amusing and pretty, which is about all the movie asks of them.

But attractive and amiable do not a good movie make. That’s especially true of sci-fi, which by its nature explores big existential questions about things like the nature of humans, relationships, and societies. Passengers has all the setup of those questions, but it seems uninterested in exploring them.

To try to understand what Passengers is getting at, and how it fails, let’s separate and dissect the three movies it comprises.

There’s no way to accurately convey the issues Passengers raises without getting into some of the plot’s specifics — so if you want to go in cold, stop now.

Movie 1: Robinson Crusoe, But in Space and With Robots

In a last man on earth/survivalist fable with just a hint of class commentary, Jim Preston (Pratt), a mechanic, wakes up in his pod on the Avalon. The trouble is, nobody else is awake.

The Avalon , in the manner of the Axiom in Pixar’s Wall-E , is more a cruise ship than anything else, carrying 5,000 passengers and crew en route to a new civilization (Earth having become overcrowded and unpleasant). The Avalon is designed to keep its occupants asleep for the first 170-ish years of their journey — they’re in suspended animation — and then wake them up four months before landing on a new settlement, where they’ll have a fresh start. In the final months, they will learn skills, mingle with fellow passengers, and enjoy the Avalon’s comforts, like restaurants, sports, video games, a swimming pool that looks out onto the stars, and the ability to spacewalk while tethered to the ship.

Unfortunately, Jim’s pod malfunctioned, and he woke up 90 years early, which means unless he can somehow get back into hibernation, he’ll spend the rest of his life alone on the ship and die before anyone wakes up.

Increasingly panicked, Jim tries to break into the crew cabin, but he doesn’t have the right security clearance. He’s comfortable enough with his economy-class cabin and basic food choices, and he has someone to talk to — a robot bartender named Arthur ( Michael Sheen ), whose programming is good enough to approximate a real bartender — but the prospect of living out his remaining days trapped alone in a huge, empty shopping mall ( in space ) drives him to desperate measures.

Much of the pleasure of this first segment of the movie comes from watching Pratt discover the ship’s amenities and explore them; his wonderment when he takes his first spacewalk is affecting, and Pratt’s comedy chops are used to their best effect here.

Then, months into his confinement, unshaven and barely summoning the will to live anymore, Jim realizes that he could wake up someone else. He spots Aurora (Lawrence) in her pod. He grows increasingly obsessed with her, watching her pre-boarding videos. She’s a writer; he reads her work. What if he woke her up and didn’t tell her what happened? What then?

Movie 2: Titanic in Space, Just the Love Story Part, but Creepier and Kind of a Twisted Horror Film

Here be some mild spoilers, if you didn’t know how Jennifer Lawrence got into this movie.

This is where things get complicated: Finally giving in to his loneliness, Jim wakes up Aurora — who happens to share a name with the princess in Sleeping Beauty — and she has basically no choice but to fall in love with him once she realizes the fix they’re in.

And yet he doesn’t tell her why she’s awake, letting her believe that her pod malfunctioned too.

The two fall in love, of course. Jim admittedly makes it easy: He is sweet, incredibly happy to see her, and full of surprises; also he looks exactly like Chris Pratt, so that can’t hurt. They go on sexy solo dates, and they have the run of the Avalon and all its luxuries. Unlike Jim, Aurora is a gold-class passenger, which means she has a very swanky room and gets much better food in the fully automated cafeteria, and Jim benefits.

Unfortunately, all the hours Jim spent pouring out his soul to Arthur stick in the robot’s advanced artificial intelligence. One night, Arthur spills the beans to Aurora about why she’s awake.

Here is where Movie 2 reveals itself to be a horror film. Imagine waking up from suspended animation to discover that you’ll die before reaching your destination, and the only bright spot is someone else who’s in the same tragic predicament, and he likes you, and you like him. Now imagine you discover that the reason your life has been taken from you is that your beloved, for all intents and purposes, chose to take your life from you before you’d even met, in order to fulfill his own needs. Imagine you only discover this after you fall in love with him.

Imagine the tragedy. Imagine the horror. Imagine how afraid you’d be of him, how obviously you’d know you could never trust this person again: You exist as the fulfillment of a fantasy, not a human with feelings and dignity. Imagine all that.

Okay. Now let us proceed to...

Movie 3: Stockholm Syndrome, the Movie (in Space)

The most peculiar thing about Aurora after the revelation is that she doesn’t seem afraid — just angry. Jim actually virtually stalks her around the ship, using the PA system to plead for forgiveness, but to Aurora this is cause for avoidance and anger, not fear.

In its third act, Passengers abruptly abandons its horror film undertones and becomes a disaster film. The ship is malfunctioning, and the corporate overlords who built it didn’t account for that possibility. Help briefly shows up, but it doesn’t last long. There are malfunctions; things fall from the ceiling; there’s an episode with what can only be called “space cancer.” It’s bad.

But this is also where the movie’s own badness solidifies. The romance between Aurora and Jim already knocked out any possibility of exploring the interesting ideas raised in Movie 1, the question of if you woke up in space and knew you’d be alone for the rest of your life, what would you do?

When the possibility of Aurora looms in front of Jim, a new set of moral quandaries presents itself: Is it ethical to effectively take away a stranger’s agency in order to save your own life? If you do it, and then you regret it, what happens?

Aurora and Jim are purposely written as being from very different cultures and classes: Aurora is a writer, the daughter of a famous writer, a “gold class” passenger with all the luxuries and amenities. Jim is a mechanic who bought his passage on the Avalon partly by promising to work for the corporation that operates it — which, by the way, raises another massive set of interesting futuristic ethical quandaries — and yet this disparity is basically ignored entirely by the film. Why bother, exactly?

When Jim’s treachery is revealed, another set of interesting questions is raised: If you discovered you’d been sleeping with the person who in essence took your life from you, what would you do? If he was the only person alive, how would you respond?

The answer Passengers gives reads like a fantasy of Stockholm syndrome, in which the captured eventually identifies and even loves the captor. We are, somehow, supposed to sympathize with Jim, and wish for him to win back Aurora’s heart. The lengths to which the movie goes to ensure that we’ll cheer for this are remarkably manipulative; every time Passengers seems as if it’s about to do something subversive, it falls back on pure, stinky cheese.

Curiously, it’s not till the very end of the film that Passengers acknowledges the fact that it’s not just Aurora and Jim’s lives that are at stake on the Avalon . The pair must, of course, consider the lives of the 5,000 other people hibernating on the ship. But instead, Passengers wants us to believe that what’s really at stake here is a romance between two people, one of whom isn’t all that far from being a prisoner.

What happened here? Who thought this was a clever story instead of a really disturbing wish fulfillment fantasy?

It’s a shame, because Passengers starts out well. Robinson Crusoe in space isn’t a bad idea. Even lonely-guy-wakes-up-girl in space isn’t a terrible notion, if the story has the simple bravery to actually confront the implications, instead of wallpapering over them and hoping nobody will notice. Passengers masquerades as a heartwarming story about the power of love — in space — but it doesn’t have a single fully formed thought rattling around in its glossy, sexy, inadvertently creepy head.

Passengers opens in theaters on December 21.

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10 great films about space travel

To infinity and beyond... Celebrate 60 years of human spaceflight with our countdown of awe-inspiring space movies.

By  Brogan Morris

Since its earliest days, cinema has been fascinated by the idea of space travel. Some 67 years before Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, Georges Méliès took audiences there with 1902’s Le Voyage dans la lune. Considered cinema’s first sci-fi, Méliès’ film sees explorers crash into Earth’s closest neighbour in a rocket shot out of a cannon, and then proceed to do battle with the insectoid inhabitants.

Today, with the benefit of another century-plus of scientific understanding, the space film looks very different. Space travel in the movies is constantly evolving. In the space race era, space movies looked forward to a utopian future. In the 70s, a murkier vision reflective of growing real-world social and political distress took hold. And then, post-Star Wars, a more fantastical and action-packed take on life in space became the norm.

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In the last decade, cinema’s view of space travel has shifted again. While the Guardians of the Galaxy movies and reboots of the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises have emphasised the adventure, many others, including Gravity (2013) and The Martian (2015), have addressed the potential perils of space travel becoming more commonplace in an age of renewed exploration. Meanwhile, an increasing number of films, among them Interstellar (2014) and this year’s upcoming Voyagers, are asking whether, if humankind exhausts the Earth, we might find a new home on a planet B.

The same basic curiosity, however, endures from the days of Méliès: what are we going to find out there among the stars? And how might the answers change the way we see the world – or ourselves?

Ikarie  XB -1 (1963)

Director: Jindrich Polák

Made in a period when a limitless future was typically imagined for extraterrestrial travel, one in which food would be magically plentiful and no star system would be too distant, Ikarie XB -1 injected some scientific and psychological realism into the space film. Adapted from Stanislaw Lem’s novel The Magellanic Cloud, Czech director Jindrich Polák’s film finds a crew travelling at light speed to a potentially life-harbouring white planet orbiting Alpha Centauri.

Although resources and leisure time are ample aboard the Ikarie, the journey is not without consequence. The trip will seem like 28 months to the crew, but the nature of relativity means their loved ones will be 15 years older when they return to Earth. Meanwhile, cabin fever (and a heavy dose of space radiation) brings some crew members to the edge of sanity. Ikarie XB -1 was a clear influence on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), with Stanley Kubrick calling it “a half step up from your average science fiction film” – which amounts to a ringing endorsement from the perfectionist filmmaker.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Director: Stanley Kubrick

A film that showed what was possible in sci-fi cinema, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 continues to be a touchstone for any picture that deals in space exploration. The story was a result of almost two years of intensive discussions between Kubrick and his co-writer, sci-fi novelist Arthur C. Clarke, and it took even longer to execute, with the director beginning filming in December 1965 and only finalising the film’s effects in March 1968.

Whether it’s a commercial flight to the moon or a classified long-range mission to Jupiter, 2001 luxuriates in its space sequences, majestic ballets of sound and movement set to classical music. Stanley Kubrick might famously never have won a best director Oscar, but he did take home one Academy Award, for 2001’s visual effects – and rightfully so. More than half a century on, the film’s depiction of space travel – realised practically through a combination of model work, huge sets and precise photographic projection – remains flawless.

Silent Running (1972)

Director: Douglas Trumbull

Some time in the future, Earth has become a climate-controlled utopia, free of disease and poverty. But it’s one which apparently has so little use left for nature that its last forests are now kept in geodesic domes orbiting Saturn. On the ship Valley Forge, botanist Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern) obsessively tends to three of these vast gardens when the order comes in to destroy them – an order Lowell disobeys by murdering the rest of the crew and piloting the ship out into deep space.

There’s a hangover of 1960s idealism to Silent Running. 2001 effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull’s directorial debut includes flower-power interludes featuring music by Joan Baez, while a multicoloured trip through Saturn’s rings has shades of an acid experience. The overriding tone, though, is one of new 1970s pessimism. Ultimately, Lowell‘s environmentalist dream sours, the peace he initially finds out in the cosmos soon giving way to loneliness and guilt over his killing for a fruitless ‘greater good’.

Star Wars (1977)

Director: George Lucas

Although sci-fi cinema generally went in a more mature direction in the 1970s, George Lucas’s empire-building third feature took a refreshingly opposite approach. Opening on an epic battle among the stars and climaxing with an even bigger one, Star Wars would present a universe where man (and Wookiee) has mastered space travel, with a quick leap from one habitable planet to the next possible at the mere push of a button.

Taking inspiration from pre-space race pulp sci-fi comics and film serials, Star Wars pays no mind to real physical or existential concerns about space travel. “Star Wars is a fantasy, much closer to the Brothers Grimm than it is to 2001…The word for this movie is fun,” said Lucas at the time. Still, not even this proto-blockbuster could totally escape the influence of the 70s, with its beat-up freighters and junky ship interiors suggesting a more hardscrabble life in space than Flash Gordon ever knew.

Alien (1979)

Director: Ridley Scott

By the time Ridley Scott made this landmark sci-fi horror, space travel had become so routine in the movies it seemed almost anyone could do it. In Alien, the astronauts are blue-collar types complaining about bonuses and food. Their latest job is towing 20 million tonnes of mineral ore back to Earth. It’s only the threat of suspension of wages that convinces the crew of the Nostromo to make their fateful detour to a nearby ‘primordial’ moon, from which they unwittingly bring back to the ship the universe’s deadliest apex predator.

From there, Scott’s film becomes a spacebound haunted house picture, as H.R. Giger’s nightmarish xenomorph eliminates the crew one by one. Alien would be followed by a number of sequels, prequels and regrettable franchise crossovers, with all but one of them set primarily on terra firma. What makes the original so uniquely frightening is how impossible escape seems for its protagonists: what awaits the crew beyond the confines of the ship is no less hostile to them than their ravenous intruder.

Apollo 13 (1995)

Director: Ron Howard

Released in a fallow period for the space movie, Apollo 13 is itself about a period in which, post-Neil Armstrong, space travel had suddenly become passé to a world preoccupied with problems on the ground. In Ron Howard’s telling of 1970’s doomed Apollo 13 adventure, it isn’t until astronauts Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks), Fred Haise (Bill Paxton) and Jack Swigert (Kevin Bacon) find themselves in mortal danger on their way home from an aborted moon landing that the TV networks even start giving the mission any airtime.

Made just years before CGI would become de rigueur for the space movie, Apollo 13 is an impressively practical spectacle. Bolstered by digital effects, the film makes extensive use of spacecraft miniatures and replica sets. Most impressively, to achieve scenes of weightlessness, Howard shot aboard the so-called ‘Vomit Comet’, a modified NASA training aircraft that – for 20 seconds at a time – would place the actors in a simulated zero-G environment.

Sunshine (2007)

Director: Danny Boyle

To save Earth from the chill of a solar winter, a crack team of scientists are despatched to the heart of our solar system on a flying bomb named Icarus II (the first Icarus having become lost after it flew literally too close to the sun). Their mission: to nuke our dying star back to life. Sunshine may have the absurd premise of a Michael Bay movie, but it also has the combined scientific and philosophical imagination of screenwriter Alex Garland and science advisor Brian Cox.

What happens when a crew of diverse credos and fallibilities embarks on a long-distance space voyage? A clash of passion and pragmatism leads to regular fights between sensitive physicist Capa (Cillian Murphy) and surly engineer Mace (Chris Evans). A miscalculation by navigator Trey (Benedict Wong) destroys biologist Corazon’s (Michelle Yeoh) precious oxygen garden, leaving him suicidal and her bereft. Faced with the desolate blackness of endless space, some crew members fall under the spell of the blazing sun. But where one sees a merciless, overwhelming celestial body, another finds God.

First Man (2018)

Director: Damien Chazelle

Following Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) from his days as a test pilot through NASA training to his historic walk on the moon, First Man is a twofer: a dramatisation of the space race from the American side as well as a revisionist biopic of a mythical figure. Here the Apollo astronauts are portrayed as everyday suburban joes – husbands and fathers whose unique attributes allowed them to do remarkable things in their time, with Armstrong the most ordinary of the bunch.

Similarly deglamorised are the recreations of historic NASA space flights, which situate the viewer inside the cockpit from Armstrong’s point-of-view and depict early spacecraft as shockingly primitive, all creaking metal and analogue tech. The docu-style brings verisimilitude, but Justin Hurwitz’s ghostly score and some fluid space scenes see there’s also a musical grace to La La Land filmmaker Damien Chazelle’s fourth feature. It’s a poetic film about unpoetic men.

Aniara (2018)

Directors: Pella Kagerman and Hugo Lilja

Released the same year as Claire Denis’ unsettling space oddity High Life, Aniara is that film’s somehow even more despairing cousin. Adapted from Harry Martinson’s epic poem, Pella Kagerman and Hugo Lilja’s film traps the viewer inside a luxurious civilian transport meant for Mars but which – following an accident – is left cruising through space, rudderless and without any way to turn around.

In time, the micro-society on board the Aniara disintegrates, High-Rise-style, with passengers first embracing hedonism and cultish new religions. Then, as resources and hope of salvation both dwindle, they succumb to despair. This is one of a number of sci-fi films this century to depict mass space transportation gone horribly awry, but where Aniara differs from the likes of Pandorum (2009) or Alien: Covenant (2017) is that its horror is entirely existential. So many films about space travel end with characters triumphing over harsh odds and ultimately finding meaning in the void. Not this one.

Ad Astra (2019)

Director: James Gray

Ad Astra is a sci-fi Heart of Darkness that is, in essence, another contemplative drama about one of director James Gray’s trademark troubled men. In this case, the customary angst and father issues go to an astronaut in the shape of a never-more-fragile Brad Pitt. On a mission from US Space Command, Pitt’s Major Roy McBride planet-hops through a solar system in the early stages of colonisation to track down daddy Tommy Lee Jones, a brilliant scientist last heard from 16 years prior, circling Neptune.

Gray’s lonely, cynical vision of late 21st-century space as a commercialised wild west makes for a spectacular backdrop to a tale of familial discord. In this future, you’ll find a branch of Subway on the moon and audiovisual displays made to simulate the wonder of Earth inside Mars’ underground bunkers. You’ll also find warring tribes figuring out new ways to kill each other in a low-gravity environment. On Earth or in space, in Ad Astra humans continue to be stubbornly human.

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Wait, Passengers Is About What ?

At the end of the  trailer for  Passengers , Chris Pratt tells Jennifer Lawrence, his fellow space traveler on a 120-year voyage to a distant planet, that “there’s a reason” both of them woke up early from suspended animation. An experienced cinemagoer might expect that the trailer is teasing a big reveal. It isn’t. You learn why Jennifer Lawrence woke up early in the movie. In fact, it’s not a twist at all — it’s the premise of the movie. (To be kind to those who prefer to go into movies without any information, we’ll hold off on revealing the not-twist until we’re out of the intro paragraph. But for those wary of reading further, know that this information was available as early as the film’s first casting announcements.)

Okay, so: The reason Jennifer Lawrence woke up early is because Chris Pratt got lonely. Passengers begins with a mysterious malfunction in the sleeping pod of Pratt’s character, Jim Preston, which causes him to wake up 90 years before his spaceship is supposed to arrive on a new interstellar colony. For the first 30 minutes or so, Pratt wanders around the spaceship, trying to make peace with the fact that he’ll die before anyone else wakes up. He bonds with Michael Sheen’s robot bartender. He grows a beard. (Think Castaway , if it took place in an Apple Store.) One day, he sees Jennifer Lawrence’s character, Aurora Lane, asleep in her pod. He watches interviews she taped before setting out on the journey, becomes convinced that they belong together, and despite knowing that she’d also be doomed to die on the ship if he woke her up, he decides to do just that.

Much of what happens next involves the two leads developing a relationship while alone on the ship together, as well as dealing with the technical problems that start to plague the spaceship. Passengers ’ trailers have played up the sexy aspects of the film, lingering on shots of Pratt’s chiseled body or Jennifer Lawrence’s bedroom eyes. But despite what the film’s marketing implies, Passengers is really more of a horror movie, especially if you view it from Aurora’s perspective: Her character never asked to take part in the space rom-com that Jim has devised for her, and compounding matters, she doesn’t know that he woke her up on purpose.

Passengers does explore the fact (it’s not really a question) of Aurora’s lack of consent — whether or not it succeeds is a matter for the reviewers. As you can deduce from the trailers, the film also introduces more action elements as the ship starts to malfunction. There are a few actual twists, which we won’t spoil here. But still, this is not exactly the movie you saw advertised, and we simply feel that it’s our duty to inform you that  Passengers is darker than it seems. A  lot darker. Like, wow.

• jennifer lawrence
• chris pratt
• not a twist

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Den of Geek

The Movies That Confronted the Scariest Challenges of Space Travel

Hollywood must be afraid of Einstein considering how few movies seriously address the theory of relativity. Here are the ones who actually face the cold truth about space travel.

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Space is great. It’s massive, it’s colorful, and you can have big fights with lasers there. It really does have everything you could want. But it also has problems—mainly, like we said, that it’s massive. In fact it’s so massive that if you want to go anywhere in it (apart from a few nearby planets with hardly anyone to shoot lasers at), by the time you get there, you’re dead. Now you might think that if you can just go fast enough, you’ll get there before you die, but there’s a problem.

That problem, as Albert Einstein tells us, is the speed of light. Light, in a vacuum, travels at just short of 300 million meters per second, fast enough to get from Earth to the moon in a little over a second. The thing is if you’re chasing a light beam, and travel behind it at 150 million meters per second, if you clock the light beam’s speed you’ll see it racing away from you at just under 300 million meters per second. But at the same time, an observer watching both of you will see the light beam move away from them at 300 million meters a second. The speed of light remains the same for both of you, but for that to be true, time has to be moving differently.

This has two important consequences. First, you are never going to be as fast as a beam of light. The second is that the closer you get to the speed of light, the more slowly time will pass to compensate.

Most movies get around this massive conundrum with hyperspace, warp drive, quantum jump technology, the improbability drive, or iso-hexagonic dimensional skipping. Alternatively, to keep your hard-sci-fi credentials, your astronauts might simply nap through the years of travel between the stars. But a small number (a really quite surprisingly small number) of films have dared to face Einstein head-on and reap the consequences of approaching the universe’s ultimate speed limit. Here’s how they addressed space travel’s most menacing challenge.

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Planet of the Apes (1968)

Perhaps the first film to take on relativistic space travel was Planet of the Apes —although credit is not given to Einstein, but to “Dr. Haslein’s theory of time.” At the very opening of the film, Charlton Heston’s character tells us that, with the speed their spacecraft travels at, time will pass more slowly for the human astronauts than it will for people back on Earth. This sets up the twist that the alien planet they land on—where three recognizable species of ape, as well as homo sapiens, speak the Queen’s English—is in fact Earth in the distant future.

It also demonstrates one of the reasons why relativistic movie space travel is so rare. Travel at 99.9999999 percent of the speed of light is at least theoretically possible, and would reduce travel between the stars in our own neighborhood to the timeframes of sail-powered ocean voyages rather than the rise and fall of civilizations. But it can look like a hat on a hat. Suddenly your space travel story is now also a time travel story. And not a fun one, like where you go back in time and save some humpback whales; it’s a sad one where the people you know age and die in moments and the world you left behind changes beyond all recognition by the time you return to it.

Dark Star (1974)

Directed by John Carpenter and written by Alien ’s Dan O’Bannon, this film doesn’t hinge any great plot twists on its time dilation. It is merely mentioned that the crew have aged only three years during their 20-year mission of rogue planet extermination. It takes the negatives of using relativity in space travel and turns them into a positive. The time dilation becomes simply another twist of the knife of isolation and dehumanisation that permeates the film. Not only are these characters removed from their families and homes to do a trivial yet dangerous job for an employer that doesn’t care for them, but those families and homes will be irreparably changed when they do see them again.

Many regard Dark Star as a prototype for Alien . The film even has its own alien lifeform running around the ship, albeit that alien looks like a beach ball with feet. And Alien is an interesting case study of Hollywood’s discomfort around the passage of time during space travel. That film sees its crew start the film waking up from hypersleep. The implication is straightforward—these are low-paid, low-valued workers whose employer thinks nothing of tossing them into space for years at a time travelling at sublight speeds.

But in Aliens , particularly the director’s cut, we learn that Ripley went on this mission expecting to be home by her daughter’s 11th birthday—not a promise you can make with any interstellar travel that doesn’t F the TL. Hollywood gets really uncomfortable with any implication that future technology might change the way people, particularly families, relate to one another, even though that is something that has habitually changed on the regular throughout human history.

Flight of the Navigator (1986) 

Flight of the Navigator is all about family relationships changing as a result of relativistic space travel. One of the more successful films to attempt to ride E.T. ’s coattails (at this point we all side-eye 1988’s Mac and Me and collectively shudder), Flight of the Navigator sees a young David Freeman abducted by an alien probe and returned years later with no time having passed. Suddenly all his school friends are 20 years old, his little brother is his big brother, his parents have spent eight years grieving for the son they had probably assumed was gruesomely murdered, and pop music is just noise, and boys on telly are wearing makeup.

So once again we are using space travel to fuel a time travel story, and a road movie as David and the alien robot Max fly across America, learning about humanity and friendship. But ultimately, to deliver the happy ending Hollywood demands, Flight of the Navigator has to fudge the science. It is not enough to allow David to adapt to the new time and family he has found himself in. The status quo must be restored, and for that to happen Max must fly David through some scary lightning effects to drop him off back in time at the precise moment he left.

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This will be the first of many such fudges.

Interstellar (2014)  

Christopher Nolan ’s space exploration flick is probably the most famous take on time dilation . It is, it has to be said, a film that has done its homework. Although it uses a wormhole to get our astronauts into outer space, a combination of speed and veering too close to serious gravity wells means that decades pass at home while only a short time passes on board the ship. As well as portraying some of the realities of time dilation, this movie also gave us our most scientifically accurate visualization yet of a black hole.

It also, admirably, does not insist on a magic backward-time-travel fudge to restore a familial status quo at the end. The film ends with Matthew McConaughey reunited with his daughter, who is now an old lady, and there is no question of magically reversing that to let him watch her grow up. But even here, the scientifically accurate black hole allows Matthew McConaughey to send a message backward in time to his daughter’s childhood because of the cosmic power of love, or something, making the entire plot into a bootstrap paradox.

Lightyear (2022)

Despite being a Pixar movie intended to be an imaginary movie that a toy is based on in another Pixar movie , Lightyear gives us a surprisingly realistic take on time dilation at extreme speeds. In this film, Buzz Lightyear is part of a crew forced to build a colony when their ship is stranded on a hostile alien planet. Buzz is used as a test pilot to perfect an engine that could allow the colonists to return home, but because he’s moving at relativistic speeds, each trip to the local star and back sends him months, years and eventually decades forward in time.

If you’re waiting for the fudge, you might be pleasantly surprised to learn that this time Buzz doesn’t find a way to go back in time and put everything back to normal. No, instead his evil alternate timeline twin does that, forcing Buzz to fight evil elderly alternate future Buzz (Zerg’s real identity). But can you make a great movie that acknowledges the crunchy realities of relativity without upsetting scientists with hand-wavy backward time travel? Well, not yet. But people are trying.

The Forever War (TBA)

Probably the best story to handle space travel at relativistic speeds is Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War . Written partially in response to the jingoistic (and a little fascist) Starship Troopers , the novel uses relativistic time dilation as a fantastic metaphor for troops returning home during the Vietnam War. It uses time dilation to portray the feeling of returning home from combat to discover the wide social changes that have taken place at home, but with plenty of space wars. In short, it is perfect movie fodder.

The film rights to the book have been changing hands since 1988. For a long time, Ridley Scott was set to direct with plans to make it a 3D spectacle to rival Avatar (which also featured space travel subject to time dilation, but you would have to read a lot of behind-the-scenes material to find that out). However, in 2015 the rights expired and were quickly bought up by Warner Bros. with the intent to make it a Channing Tatum vehicle. The film is supposedly still in development, but just like on a spaceship moving at close to the speed of light, time moves slowly in development hell.

And the Honorable Mentions

At time of writing MGM have just announced a release date for their adaptation of Project Hail Mary , an extrapolation of a novel by The Martian author Andy Weir, with Phil Lord and Chris Miller sitting in the (double-seated) directors’ chair. The film, starring Ryan Gosling, attempts to offer a hard sci-fi take on an astronaut travelling to a nearby star to find the source of a mysterious space-borne lifeform that is causing our sun to dim.

Unlike The Forever War , time dilation doesn’t make up a huge part of the story other than emphasizing how isolated the hero is, but it is still mentioned in the book and forms a crucial plot point.

Outside of movies, a band of developers who previously worked on the Mass Effect games have now announced the action RPG, Exodus , a seemingly hard-sci-fi take on the space opera where the player will endure time dilation as they travel from system to system while epochs pass behind them. But after a lot of searching, we have found precisely five completed films that make use of time dilation, three of which fudge the science (If you know of any others, please let us know in the comments. This isn’t an attempt to drive engagement, I just want to watch those movies!).

Of course a lot of space travel stories still reach straight for the hyperdrive, but by embracing space travel, you not only open up opportunities to let people see far beyond their years, and show off the ways that spacetime can behave far more weirdly than any science fiction creation; you also drives home just how big our universe really is.

Chris Farnell’s Fermi’s Progress stories do use a faster-than-light spacecraft, but it is one that destroys every planet in its wake.

Chris Farnell

Chris Farnell is a freelance writer and the author of a novel, an anthology, a Doctor Who themed joke book and some supplementary RPG material. He…

35+ Exhilarating Movies About Space Travel

Movies About Space Travel (Top Picks At A Glance)

This post contains affiliate links. For more information, see my disclosure here .

Space travel is endlessly fascinating, and movies about it are no exception. There’s something about space travel that just captures the imagination. Maybe it’s the mystery of the cosmos, or the sense of adventure inherent in exploring new worlds. Whatever it is, movies about space travel never failed to fascinate us.

In fact, some of the best and most exciting films out there are about space exploration. If you’re looking for exciting movies to watch that will take you into the vast expanse of space, check out these 40 exhilarating titles you can’t miss. So sit back, relax, and prepare for takeoff!

• Best Space Horror Movies You Can’t Miss

1.   Hidden Figures

Where To Watch

If you’re a fan of the space race, then you’re going to love Hidden Figures. The film tells the story of three black women who worked at NASA during the early days of the space program.

Despite their brilliance and talent, these women faced racism and sexism at every turn. But they never gave up, and eventually made history. If you want to see a movie that celebrates determination and achievement, Hidden Figures is definitely worth checking out.

Hidden Figures Movie Description

One of the greatest space operations to ever take place was the launch of astronaut John Glenn into Earth’s orbit. Behind this operation were Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson. Three gifted African-American women. This is their story.

2.   First Man

If you’re into biopics, then “First Man” is definitely worth your time. The movie tells the story of Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon.

It’s a very emotional film, and Ryan Gosling gives an amazing performance as Armstrong. It’s a gripping tale that is sure to leave you with a new appreciation for space exploration.

First Man Movie Description

Between 1961 and 1969, Neil Armstrong ( Ryan Gosling ) went from being a test pilot in California to a NASA astronaut in Houston to the first person to walk on the moon. While still piloting planes in the Mojave Desert, Neil and his wife, Janet ( Claire Foy ), lose their second child, Karen, who dies of brain cancer.

Neil is then hired to work for NASA’s space program in Houston as an official member. Along with Janet, he meets other astronauts, like Ed White ( Jason Clarke ), Elliott See ( Patrick Fugit ), and Jim Lovell ( Pablo Schreiber ), and their families as they embark on dangerous missions leading up to the race to the moon.

3.   Solaris

This mind-bending film is one of the most exciting and original sci-fi flicks ever made. Soar through space with Kris Kelvin and his fellow astronauts as they explore the strange and mystifying planet Solaris. What secrets does this far-off world hold? You’ll have to watch to find out!

Solaris Movie Description

George Clooney stars in this science-fiction thriller as the psychologist Chris Kelvin, who is sent to a space station to look into a series of inexplicable occurrences that appear to be triggered by the nearby planet Solaris.

As he experiences the phenomenon for himself, seeing a version of his deceased wife, Rheya ( Natascha McElhone ), he struggles to separate his emotions from reality as he is drawn further into the mystery onboard.

4.   Interstellar

If you haven’t seen interstellar yet then are you really even a space movies fan? This raised the bar for movies about space travel. Even if you’ve already seen this film you should go ahead and watch it again!

Interstellar Movie Description

In the future, a worldwide crop epidemic and second Dust Bowl will eventually make Earth unlivable. Professor Brand ( Michael Caine ), a brilliant NASA physicist, is developing plans to save humanity by transporting people to a new home via a wormhole.

But first, Brand must dispatch Cooper ( Matthew McConaughey ), a former NASA pilot, and a team of researchers across the universe via the wormhole in order to discover which of three planets might be mankind’s new home.

• Movies Like Interstellar

5.   High Life

Imagine if we sent prisoners to outer space! That would be absolutely crazy! This films is all kinds of weird and crazy and if you haven’t seen it you should give it a watch at least once. But seriously, this is a very strange movie.

High Life Movie Description

When a space mission with convicts turns to chaos, Monte ( Robert Pattinson ) must struggle to survive outside the solar system as he raises his infant daughter. In a race for survival against the oblivion of a black hole, they will now have to rely on each other.

6.   Stowaway

Moral dilemmas are tough because they force you to make a decision that could have serious consequences.

They’re especially difficult when they happen in space because the stakes are so high. We don’t know what we would do if we were ever in a situation like the one portrayed in this movie.

Stowaway Movie Description

Three astronauts take off on a rocket ship to Mars. The mission is set to last for two years. They discover a man within 12 hours inside one of the ship’s ceiling panels, apparently knocked unconscious before the launch. Due to the damage caused by his discovery, there is a loss of oxygen on the ship.

They soon realize they only have enough oxygen for three humans to survive their trek, not four. They will make a series of increasingly risky attempts to solve the problem due to the fact that their lives are at stake.

7.   Passengers

Passengers is a fascinating and complex sci-fi film. The film’s entire premise is pretty awesome. It’s also quite fun to see if you’d make some of the same decisions. If you haven’t seen this one, it’s worth a watch!

Passengers Movie Description

The Avalon, a ship meant to transfer 5,000 passengers from Earth to a new home suffers a malfunction. One of the passengers, Jim ( Chris Pratt ), is awoken 90 years early.

After becoming incredibly lonely and unable to go back into cryosleep, Jim wakes up Aurora ( Jennifer Lawrence ), against his better judgment. It isn’t long before the two form a relationship. But Jim still hasn’t told her, he was the one to sentence her to live out the rest of her life on a ship.

• Movies Like Passengers

8.   2001: A Space Odyssey

This movie is an absolute classic! We will warn you though, it starts off ridiculously slow. but don’t let that put you off! Everyone has to watch this space classic at least once!

2001: A Space Odyssey Movie Description

Sent on a secretive mission, a group of astronauts ends up in a tense showdown with their ship’s operating system Hal, a machine that has become increasingly more self-aware through its time, traveling in space.

9.   Zathura: A Space Adventure

If you’re looking for an exciting outer space adventure to watch with your family, Zathura is the perfect movie choice!

With stunning visuals and an engaging plot, Zathura is sure to keep you entertained from start to finish. So put on your space helmets and get ready for some serious fun!

Zathura: A Space Adventure Movie Description

Lisa ( Kristen Stewart ), is left looking after her younger brothers Walter ( Josh Hutcherson ) and Danny ( Jonah Bobo ) after their father heads off to work.

A seemingly boring day turns into a spectacle when the kids begin to play a board game called Zathura. Their home is shot into space and they must now find a way back before their father arrives back home.

10.   Star Trek

One of the first series that comes to mind when you think about space travel movies is all the Star Trek films! If you aren’t a Star Trek fan yet then you are seriously missing out! You should definitely give this one a watch!

Star Trek Movie Description

The crew of the USS Enterprise is in for a rude awakening when their paths cross with the ruthless Romulan commander Nero ( Eric Bana ).

The crew which includes James T. Kirk ( Chris Pine ), a hotheaded young officer, and Spock ( Zachary Quinto ), a logical Vulcan, must find a way to work together and stop Nero from eliminating the human race.

11.   Europa Report

The uniqueness of this film lies in the fact that they shot it using found footage, which lends it a documentary feel. Europa Report will make you feel like an explorer looking at the first alien planet that has ever been discovered.

It’s pretty scary to think that something could be lurking out there as close as on one of Jupiter’s moons. 

Europa Report Movie Description

A probe has detected some mild signatures of life on one of Jupiter’s moons. Scientists are quick to send a team of astronauts to check it out. However, not long after landing on the cold desolate moon, they quickly begin to realize they are not welcome here.

Those are the films we believe will give you the perfect experience if you’re looking for the best space travel movies. However, there are tons more movies about space travel out there that are waiting for your viewing.

Below we’ll be listing all the other movies we combed through that just barely got beat out by the films above. So, if you’ve already watched through our top picks, then these should be next on your list!

25 More Stunning Movies About Space Travel

• The Midnight Sky (2020)
• Lucy In The Sky (2019)
• Voyagers (2021)
• Ad Astra (2019)
• Proxima (2019)
• The Cloverfield Paradox (2018)
• The Martian (2015)
• 2036 Unknown Origin (2018)
• Pandorum (2009)
• Event Horizon (1997)
• Moon (2009)
• Guardians Of The Galaxy (2014)
• Gravity (2013)
• Apollo 13 (1995)
• Star Wars (1977)
• Serenity (2005)
• Avatar (2009)
• Blade Runner (1982)
• Prometheus (2012)
• E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
• Apollo 11 (2019)
• Alien (1979)
• The Colony (2021)
• Life (2017)
• The Wandering Earth (2019)

About The Author

Ryan Cooper

Uplifting Space Travel Movies

1. The Martian

3. Apollo 18

4. Apollo 13

5. Apollo 11

6. Moonshot

7. Armageddon

8. Independence Day

9. Star Trek

10. Stargate SG-1

11. Farscape

12. Stargate

14. Andromeda

15. Firefly

16. Star Trek

17. 2001: A Space Odyssey

18. Serenity

19. Babylon 5

20. Men in Black

22. Sunshine

24. Ender's Game

25. The Day the Earth Stood Still

26. Contact

27. Passengers

28. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

29. The Space Between Us

30. Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens

31. Absolutely Anything

32. Lost in Space

33. Buck Rogers in the 25th Century

34. Salvage 1

35. Explorers

36. From the Earth to the Moon

37. From the Earth to the Moon

38. Flight of the Navigator

39. The Astronaut Farmer

40. Destination Moon

41. When Worlds Collide

42. This Island Earth

43. First Men in the Moon

44. Arrival

45. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

46. Interstellar

47. Flash Gordon

48. Flash Gordon

49. Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe

50. Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars

51. Flash Gordon

52. Rocket Ship

53. Buck Rogers in the 25th Century

54. Battlestar Galactica

55. Space Station 3D

56. Starship Troopers

57. Silent Running

58. Wing Commander

59. The Ice Pirates

60. SpaceCamp

61. Blue Planet

63. Destiny in Space

64. Roving Mars

65. Journey to Space

66. The Dream Is Alive

67. Conquest of Space

68. Space Hospital

69. Earth II

70. Marooned

71. Titan A.E.

72. Outland

73. Forbidden Planet

74. Dark Star

77. Lost in Space

78. Lost in Space Forever

79. The Right Stuff

80. The Orville

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