With all the technology and games he still should have been enjoying life on the ship a year later. It would be an ideal fantasy world. Many people dream to be on a deserted island with all the food, games and alcohol you wanted.
I think 3 years would have been more believable for him to start getting lonely or consider suicide and question his morality.
Human beings are social creatures. You can't simply be alone for all that time.
shareFor a year? Sure you can.
People have spent far more time alone than that without going mad or suicidal.
The bartender provided plenty of interaction for me to survive with all those amenities and unlimited booze for a year. I'd shoot some hoops, swim, watch some movies and get drunk.
shareSame, I'd see it as an extended vacation. I've gone months without ANY human interaction without a problem, I doubt I'd have trouble with a year. But I guess different people have different requirements when it comes to human interaction.
Agreed, 1 year isn't enough, 3 would be the minimum.
He had unlimited food, movies, games, alcohol. I mean that's a pretty sweet life, you wouldn't go crazy after only a year.
It would be an ideal fantasy world.
I don't agree. We are not talking about being alone in a small ship or small confined area. He had a large living area with different recreational rooms. He had the bar tender to talk to, the Internet/computer/videos. Games, restaurants and robots to interact with, I think I saw chickens too if he wanted animal companions. He may have still become lonely,depending on his personality type, but he should have been stimulated enough to keep sane for only 12months. I’ve gone roughly 8month without human contact (however I did talk online Occasionally) I cannot see how 1 year would have been a problem.
shareWe are not talking about being alone in a small ship or small confined area. He had a large living area with different recreational rooms.
He had the bar tender to talk to, the Internet/computer/videos. Games, restaurants and robots to interact with.
I think I saw chickens too if he wanted animal companions
I’ve gone roughly 8month without human contact (however I did talk online Occasionally) I cannot see how 1 year would have been a problem.
Just because some need constant social validation, doesn't mean everyone does.
Welcome to the internet, everyone knows everything, and no one likes anything
Just because some need constant social validation, doesn't mean everyone does.
I would have waited a week, maybe. You must not like sex.
"I'm doing good in the game, so I'm doing good in life!" - Charlie Kelly
I would have waited a week, maybe. You must not like sex.
Spoken like someone who never has sex (otherwise you wouldn't be trying to convince strangers on the internet how much you have)
Welcome to the internet, everyone knows everything, and no one likes anything
If JLaw hadn't been woken, then he wouldn't have talked to anyone for 2 years till the crew member woke up. Then the ship would have exploded killing everyone due to not being able to repair it on his own. So he obviously made the right decision.
shareI 100% disagree. The way you make the "right decision" has nothing to do with the final result and you shouldn't be totally results-oriented when evaluating decision-making.
I play poker. I've studied things like game theory (which isn't just relevant for gaming, by the way). And I think what matters when making a decision is how informed you're able to become at the time of making it and then making the best guess you can reasonably expect to make when deciding.
Poker, for example, often has you putting in money because you're ahead in a hand... you don't know for sure what the outcome of most any hand is going to be, but you try your best to "play the percentages."
The person that is putting tons of chips at risk on their inside straight draw may in fact make that draw! But even if they make that draw then it doesn't change the fact that they were making terrible decisions by investing in that draw. The results don't matter because the decision process was before they can know the results.
If we want to suggest that Jim made a good decision because he was able to save the ship then we should have to decide that Jim knew he would need her help when he was waking her up and that was his motivation for waking her.
Whether it worked out for the best or not... Jim's decision was not a "good" one.
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I disagree with the OP for at least two reasons. First is the premise hat being on a desert (deserted) island is somehow equivalent. It is not. The second is what is the point of waiting? If Jim was going to waken Aurora, what would have been achieved if he waited another year or two?
This film makes me think of two rather different films or stories. There is obviously the castaway genre/narrative, probably most commonly based on the Robinson Crusoe novel by Daniel Defoe. Apparently based on a true story of a man shipwrecked on an island off Chile for four years, the fictional Crusoe lived 27 years on an island in the Caribbean, before being rescued. But... the differences are telling. First of all Crusoe's life purpose was not only survival, finding food and water and shelter, but also importantly toward being rescued. He had hope that he would be rescued, as he ultimately was. This makes the castaway story different from Passengers in that one critical respect. Jim and Aurora have no hope of being rescued. They cannot and do not wonder (after a certain point, of course, that being when they accept the truth that they will not be rescued) about that, and it does not motivate their lives and life purpose.
The other derives from Existentialist films of the fifties and sixties, especially Ingmar Bergman's masterpiece Persona. The title was taken from Carl Jung's use of the term persona as not merely the "mask" that not so much hides the soul in the dealings we have with the world around us, including others. There is additionally the dynamic sense beyond the static, of how the persona is the way we interact.
Persona raises the question of how far our search for truth and authenticity in dealing with others can take that dynamic, mediating presence and in fact reveal inner truths about our inner selves. But it also (relevant to Passengers) necessarily ends up contemplating how much we are in fact our personas, and more to the point whether our inner selves, our souls, can be said to exist separate from our personas. Along the way it also makes clear that the persona is very much a dynamic that depends on interaction with others.
I suppose then that the point made in comparing Persona to Passengers is in what sense do we exist when apart from others? Robinson Crusoe in effect showed that it was the hope and anticipation of again being in the company of other people that motivated its protagonist. without that, what did he have? In Persona a character who attempts to cut herself off from others and replace her past way of dealing with people tries in fits and starts to develop a new way of dealing with others, but runs into difficulties, while her countering character deals with this from the other side as it were. Along the way both come to question the sense in which they exist apart from their personas, and the film suggests the answer is we do not, cannot.
Passengers takes this dynamic and in its earliest third of the film comes to strongly suggest that Jim may physically exist alone by himself in the Avalon, but he also begins to disintegrate without that dynamic the persona provides in dealing with others. In other words, no interaction, no human involvement, and the self, which in absolute physical terms is no less there, in HUMAN terms begins a deterioration, which eventually becomes a choice between seeking others (as there was for Crusoe) or death in suicide. (Interestingly in Persona the character who has withdrawn is tacitly recognized as having chosen against suicide because she does live in the world. But that choice to do so inevitably forces her to use her persona and interact with others.)
But in any event regarding the OP I don't see the point in waiting once Jim has decided he wants/needs to wake up Aurora. I also do not see Passengers as qualifying due to a critical distinction from the castaway trope.
This will of course vary from one person to another, but I can say from personal experience -- a pre-internet period when I was largely cut off from friends and companionship for a time (though living in a foreign city and still interacting with strangers) -- that I would have started going to pieces after about six or eight weeks in that kind of isolation. Holding out for an entire year seems, to me, almost heroic. So, personally, I had trouble blaming the Jim character for what he did.
shareI thought the film did a wonderful job of showcasing the isolation in the first act. He goes through a period where he's actually enjoying himself has nice he accepts his fate. That grows old quickly and his loneliness is really conveyed well.
Film gave me kind of an anxious feeling during that period akin to how I feel when I'm getting claustrophobic.