Sleeping Beauty in Space

I was thinking this week, you know how they have, like Hollywood always does these, or at least they don't do it so much anymore, I guess. But when we were growing up, they would always do like two movies that are the exact same movie, but from two different studios, like Ants and A Bug's Life, right? Most of those were the fault of Jeffrey Katzenberg. Right, dude. When he started DreamWorks. So they've always got these movies that are basically the same movie, but from two different studios. so that got me thinking you know how they made lake placid versus anaconda if you say so somebody needs to make deep impact versus armageddon we need to have a movie about these two unstoppable asteroids hurtling towards each other and they're just gonna duke it out dude dude who would win in a fight deep impact asteroid or armageddon asteroid which one would win i don't know i mean i might watch this movie if there was like an anaconda on one asteroid and a crocodile on the

other dude that'd be so great it's like in the little prince universe and these two animals are piloting their asteroids at each other oh man this is good i think the deep impact asteroid would win Not because it's the better movie or the more well-received movie, but simply because the Armageddon asteroid lost. The Deep Impact asteroid won, right? Yeah, that is true. Well, with all this talk of asteroids and anacondas and alligators, I'm certain our viewers have already guessed that we are here today to talk about Sleeping Beauty. Hello and welcome to The Popcorn Isn't Real, the podcast where we talk about crazy fan theories today we are going to be talking about the 2016 mostly romance somewhat sci-fi well it's very sci-fi but it's mostly a romance called passengers yeah passengers so i really like passengers yeah no star-studded cast jennifer lawrence michael sheen and laurence fishburn

and that's it no more four people are and michael sheen plays the bartender it was written by john spates it was directed by morton tildom we're talking about a 2016 sci-fi remake of sleeping beauty that flew under everybody's radar also known as passengers i bet you our viewers i'll bet you guys didn't know that passengers is actually a futuristic retelling of sleeping beauty the fairy tale myth from ages long gone wow who blew your mind with that theory dude you did it was insane i watched this movie and i was like hey that was a pretty good movie and you were like I hated that movie, but I did think it was interesting that it was like a weird sci-fi Sleeping Beauty. Well, see, here's the thing. I don't even consider that to be a theory. I just think that's pretty obvious. You watch it. It is really obvious. And yet I somehow didn't notice it. I was embarrassed that I didn't notice it. It's so obvious. Because that theory is too obvious,

the real theory we're going to be covering today is that in the movie Passengers, there was only one accidental malfunction aboard the Avalon. And every other malfunction we see in this movie was caused by a psychotic mechanic passenger named Jim Preston, who woke up too soon and resorted to sabotage and murder in order to make the object of his obsession fall in love with him. Whoa. But yeah, also this is a sci-fi adaptation of Sleeping Beauty, but you know, that's pretty obvious. Let's set the stage. They're on a spaceship. It's basically a huge luxury cruise liner, But instead of just taking, you know, a few weeks or a few months, it's going to be in route for like 120 years. It's on its way to Homestead 2. Everyone is put to sleep in hibernation pods and they're going to wake up when they get there. What could possibly go wrong? Sounds wonderful. Well, and apparently nothing could possibly go wrong.

This ship, the Avalon, has done this trip five times there and back. So it's made the trip like 10 times, actually. This ship is a thousand years old. Yeah, I was going to say, 1,000 years old. Homestead has been populated for 1,000 years. And it has never, ever had a problem before Jim Preston. That is a little suspicious. So I was thinking we can go through pretty rapidly all of the similarities, all the parallels between Passengers and Sleeping Beauty. And then we could maybe talk about some of the more interesting points of the movie after that, and those might also work into your other theories. the first thing this spaceship when you first see it kind of looks like a black dragon i mean it does or like i don't know a bundle of thorns and brambles right having just watched disney's sleeping beauty like it's a long skinny black dragon that maleficent turns into and it's very pointy and angular green fire as well right and now obviously the ship doesn't

look exactly like that but it's not silver like it's not like the ship in 2001 a space odyssey it's a black spaceship it it's made to look very black and very pointy and it shoots fire as we find out later which is kind of weird the ship contains a woman named aurora and the princess that's the most obvious one named aurora i can't believe i missed that the first time i watched it like i know like it occurred to me i was like oh aurora when jim preston starts talking with the bartender arthur about aurora he immediately says ah the sleeping girl which is just another way of saying sleeping beauty he's basically saying sleeping beauty sleeping he is and you just mentioned jim who is our handsome prince of this movie you might not like him but you can't say he's not handsome sure when he's not bearded and sitting next to her saying you're funny yeah well he gets pretty unhandsome yes no he's a mechanic that's

kind of like a prince oh no wait not at all not at all okay so wait you just mentioned that when he's sitting next to her with his big beard observing her from afar without her knowledge which is exactly what the prince does in the disney movie from afar in the disney movie when the prince does finally come up to her he kind of like creeps up on her from behind and in this absolutely creeps up on her from behind but it's behind like a a fountain that's in the middle of the room yeah no and he's like stalking her and watching her from behind and then as soon as he comes behind her he's like i'd love you yes he does it i know when chris pratt started belting out the lyrics to that song i was like oh disney's gonna have a field day with this no wait that didn't happen wait no so but along with the lines of that song he may not say it word for word but he does fall deeply in love with her and seem to think that they already have

a relationship when they absolutely do not have a relationship which is exactly what the prince does in sleeping beauty uh he cuts into her song and says we do know each other we've met before because of her song because of her poetry or her writing she's a songwriter in sleeping beauty apparently but in this she's just an actual writer and he falls in love with her because of her writing we also have in the sleeping beauty fairy tale and in the disney version the entire kingdom is cursed to sleep or wait for a hundred years the entire ship full of people cursed to sleep for a hundred years yeah seems pretty similar i got that one too yep aurora is awoken by the prince's love which she's awoken by his um obsession in the in the passengers but you know but in the making of everyone who talked about the hibernation pods referred to them as trees and this is because the hibernation pods are arrayed in a ring around a column that sprouts

up out of the ground like a tree and has a canopy that goes over the uh the pods and i thought that was really interesting because having the people sleep in trees kind of surrounded by thorns from these trees i mean that's exactly what they're doing in the fairy tale specifically the fairy tale it says that in the castle and around the castle there sprouted trees brambles saplings bushes but when the passengers do wake up the whole place is overgrown with trees and thorns and bushes and brambles just like exactly how they find it in the myth and in the disney movie presumably i don't think the dragon burnt all the brambles down the first thing the pod does to wake you up is inject you with something her arm gets pierced with the spinning wheel with a needle instead of her hand getting pierced with the spinning wheel instead of a kiss waking her up and the needle putting her to sleep it's kind of the opposite in this movie with the needle waking

her up into the hell of being imprisoned right anyway when it clicked for me that this actually is sleeping beauty was when you described to me chris pratt fighting the fire breathing dragon with his magical shield his magical fireproof shield protecting him to save the kingdom from destruction the kingdom being the ship and i was like this is sleeping beauty that's the last shot in Sleeping Beauty one of the most iconic shots from Sleeping Beauty is when he holds up his shield and he's blocking that green fire you know and then Chris Pratt chops off this door holds it he says it's a heat shield and then he just goes out there and blocks fire from this dragon-like spaceship that for no reason shoots fire I know it's overheating I know that doesn't mean that it needs to shoot fire it doesn't make any sense I the first time watching it I liked the movie a lot we got to this part i still liked it but i was like man that's so contrived could they not have

come up with a better problem for him to solve no it had to be this problem because it had to be a fire breathing dragon it was necessary for this to be a sleeping beauty retelling i love it no and and like obviously i noticed the aurora thing but the first time i watched it that was when it clicked for me too was when he had the shield and was blocking fire with i was like oh and then all of a sudden i i liked the movie a little bit more at that point i was like that's kind of cool this is a sleeping beauty retelling in space we've gone over the main similarities and parallels i think those were all that i had that's all all i've got too and just to be clear now we are covering the theory not about sleeping beauty this is the theory that jim was a psycho that the only thing that ever malfunctioned on the ship was just jim's pod every other thing that went wrong was from jim's sabotage of the ship and later he murders gus okay so they're flying along and one meteor

gets through the heat shield of the avalon i believe this one meteor getting through is the only malfunction that the avalon encounters and it's minor it just messes with one pod jim preston and he wakes up early that is all oh here's how i know that we don't actually see the meteor strike the ship we follow the meteor we see it burning up as it goes through the shield and then the camera continues through the shield but there's nothing in front of the camera and then it cuts so we do see the ship computer it quickly and easily repairs all systems it shows all the systems that are red and it changes them to green as laurence fishburn explains later green is good red is bad the one system that does not get repaired it's jim preston's pod that's the only thing. Every other system was prepared. I have to ask you a question here. If this is your hypothesis, then how do you explain the gaping hole in the engine room? We see many of the tools

that Jim Preston has that he's using to actively destroy this ship. Aurora stares in like horror and wonder at these tools for one shot after she wakes up. And one of them is a jackhammer, or at least a very heavy-duty jackhammer-looking tool. So he definitely has the tools to make holes in the ship if he wants to. And we see him doing it. He makes holes all around the bridge room. He just can't get into it because it's reinforced. But there is one deleted scene where Lawrence Fishburne, Gus, he explains the problem in further detail to Jim. He takes him to the ship's main CPU and shows Jim that I think one or two of the cores of the CPU has burnt out. and he says this is the problem this is why you know there are these errors and then the ship tries to fix them but then more errors come the reason is because this core burnt out so there's too few cores that are shouldering the load here and every once in a while it gets overwhelmed and

errors happen and it does its best to fix them this is no argument against my theory because during this deleted scene he also kind of looks at jim preston and gives him a surprise look he's like wow you're you know how to do this like jim already knows how to do everything with these cpus and replace them he clearly knows how this thing already works and he's causing problems to cause more problems he knows that if he overloads the computer more stuff will go wrong which is what he wants to happen i just have to say i do love the scenes of him getting ready and psyching himself up and being all ready to meet all the other passengers and then slowly realizing that he's all alone he's gonna wear his cool jacket he's just a guy with a cool jacket but no he doesn't wear his cool jacket no i love it i thought it was great but this is important because this is a guy who's all about image he will do anything to protect his image and he likes to be liked

so he meets the the bartender and i love the bartender his name is arthur he's probably one of the best characters the best character in the entire actor is just amazing at always staying character. What an actor. He is one of the most accurate portrayals of how a humanoid robot would work in the future. I love it when he says, Jim, these are not robot questions. Right. He's just like, I can't have this conversation. But like, I mean, it's like Alexa saying, I'm sorry, I don't know that. Exactly. Yes. And I like that he's not sinister. He's not evil. He has no ulterior motives he has no motives at all because he's a robot i think it's really good now i i agree with you that he himself is not sinister i would say that there is something sinister about him and let's get into that so there is jim preston i think should be really more creeped out when he's alone on the ship and the only person he finds is the bartender from the shining

also the exact bar from the shining it even has the shining rug pattern on the floor and this is intentional it is they talked about it in the making of they were all like yeah so we designed the entire ship in this one way but then when we designed the bar we were like let's go art deco let's go old-fashioned let's go shining and then they talked about how they did the rugs they did the bar and they even framed every shot to be kubrick-esque in the bar and i was like wow no this bar is creepy you know at first i i wasn't quite sure why i was creeped out by the bar and then i you know realized oh this is the bar from the shining this is the gold room now the question is why now as a film student i read a required cinematography book where a veteran cinematographer tells a story about him and a bunch of other cinematographers were critiquing a young cinematographer who had just shot a short film and he had one shot where he had the main character's

head framed in the center of like behind him there was a poster on the wall of travis bickle from taxi driver this young dude was proud of this shot because it looked cool but the other cinematographers were confused they're like why did you do this why frame your main character's head in front of a poster of travis bickle are you trying to say he's a psychopath like travis bickle and this young cinematographer was confused he was like no i just thought it looked cool and all the veterans were like no you never do that everything in your shot means something so yeah I think if they put one of the most iconic evil bars in cinema history into this movie, it must mean something. As we will see later, this bar is where Jim Preston slowly goes insane in an isolated place, just like Jack Torrance. Okay. It's foreshadowing, telling us that Jim Preston is not only going to go crazy, but he will murder someone by the end of this film.

It's exactly what they're doing, yes. I mean, maybe not with the murder, but no, they are absolutely foreshadowing that he's going crazy completely, like intentionally. But in The Shining, Jack only murders one person. And I would argue Jim only murders one person. And just like Jack Torrance in The Shining, it is also an African-American man who shows up randomly and dies instantly. Yeah, I know. It's just like in The Shining. Yeah, completely. He shows up already to save the day and then just gets axed in the back. And I don't think that is accidental. Okay, I'm with you. I like it. I like where you're going. So you're saying that Passengers is a modern retelling, modern sci-fi retelling of The Shining. Not, not, not necessarily. No, I like it. I think that should be the title of our episode. I'm saying that they're evoking The Shining to tell us something about this seemingly mild-mannered character.

No, it is a modern sci-fi retelling of The Shining. This guy is psychotic. He's going to do some crazy things. I love his descent into madness. It was one of my favorite parts of the movie. I actually went to see this movie in theaters because the trailers implied to me that it was going to be a psychological horror, what with the shots of him going kind of crazy and then the robot bartender, you know, freaking out and slamming its face all over the bar. So that was what I thought it was going to be going in. And it didn't disappoint because he does go crazy and do horrible things. So I love the movie as a psychological horror. So I like where you're going with this. So, important to the theory, there are three details I have to point out. He starts looking through manuals. And the first one he pulls out is the manual for the medical autodoc, which will be important later. Yeah, it will be.

And we know that he reads all these manuals and is an expert, as Gus kind of later notices. The second manual he pulls out is the bar service module, which is Arthur. And the last one is the hibernation pod manual. Now, these are the three systems he tampers with that allow him to murder Gus and trick Aurora at the end of the movie. He does. And this is intentional and it's canon. I can prove that. But yeah, keep going. When we see him with tons of tools in front of the bridge and he's cutting into the walls, the very next shot, it shows the computer having tons of malfunctions. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's right after he does this. This isn't because of the meteor. Seems like he messed something up. Yeah. And then right after that is when the elevator malfunctions for the first time. Now, whether he's sabotaging it at this point, I don't know if it's intentional or not. I think it's pretty clear.

No, I think he was just being an idiot. Yeah, I think he's just being an idiot right here and he screwed up the ship with his tampering. But why else have that scene follow directly from the scene where he's messing with the door with big tools? It's very purposeful. And then the next scene, he's messing with the robots. He's eating breakfast and he yells at them, get out of here. And then he starts feeding them. And then there's the extended scene where he leads them around using food with a CG bowl. But then he's like, this level of control does not amuse me. And then throws the bowl. Yes. And then in this extended sequence, we get this really cool sequence where he tells Arthur, give me a new drink every day. And then after a montage, he comes back and Arthur's like, I can only make a thousand cocktails. There's no drinks left. You've had them all. Then Jim looks really crazy and stares down.

He's like, there are no more drinks. Dude, Jack Torrance. Jack Torrance. He's in the Shining Bar. I actually, I thought the same thing here. And he's got no beer, no TV. He has no drinks left.

I mean, that's Simpsons. This is right before he starts turning into a complete stalker and becomes totally obsessed with Aurora and then gets her out. Like, I mean, they're doing a really good job here in Polite. How could he do that to her? He is so horrible doing that to her. He is irredeemable. He's disgusting. He's watching her sleep while also watching her video that she made at the same time. And then looks at her and he's like, you're funny. So he says you're funny about something she said that is not particularly funny. No, it's not funny. She said the ship is like a school bus, but the bus takes 120 years to get here. Yeah, it was not that clever. Or funny. Pretty good. And then, oh, the most psychotic line. do you ever read something if you like it's written just for you it's totally not written oh it's so stalkery she did not write that for you dude no she doesn't know you i thought that

it was pretty telling for our gym that it only took one year for him to go utterly completely balls to the wall crazy and just doom this girl to a life in solitary that was something i was going to talk about like it just has so much less effect now that we've been in a pandemic for over two years where it's like dude it was just a year man come on you had we were in a pandemic in our houses we couldn't go to like random restaurants and be the only person there and not have to wait in line and also like just go to dance parties whenever we want so yes gross jim wakes up aurora we're there and then he asks her on a date using a cute robot that he fixed up himself like it seems so cute and sweet except wait a minute camera to to spy on her yeah he's spying on her and we know that he can tamper with and control robots and that is going to be important later on too also she swims naked in the pool and he's just like peeping in on her it's like yeah she's doing this

for me this is for me right now that's right she turns around and smiles at him like this is for you so either this is like a male wish fulfillment fantasy and i can't stand it or he's just a psycho jack that's all in his mind he's imagining this yeah that she's like oh i'm doing this just for you i do love that swimming pool though that's so cool i wish i was on a spaceship with an infinity pool but what if the gravity turned off dude wait what if the gravity turned out oh no then i'd be like stuck in a giant ball of floating water and if i ever tried to swim it would push the ball along with me because there'd be no gravity to force it back down and i would just be stuck and drowning that would be horrible oh no dude that actually happened to me in virtual reality once which i'm gonna tell you about oh uh so he takes uh jennifer lawrence on a date uh they go on a spacewalk which he has already done before very suicidally but anyway he apparently has no friends

or family to speak of back home he never mentions him he doesn't seem to be particularly conflicted about leaving home and everyone behind now aurora on the other hand is very conflicted and had like tons of friends but she wants to be a great writer so she sacrifices all of that her friends left her just the meanest worst video message ever oh man it is a horrible message sad but like also i mean everything she's saying she's like basically telling her stop trying to be great stop aspiring to anything just you know settle for whatever life you have chris pratt dude yeah that's all her friend is telling her and i was like wow her friend hates her and my wife, we were watching the movie together. She pointed out to me, she's like, wow, her friend doesn't seem to like her very much. I was like, you're right. Her friend is just being mean. There is an extended scene where we learn a little more about Jim Preston. Jim and Aurora

get tacos for Taco Tuesday. Aurora asks him about himself. He says he's from Denver and she says, so what were you there? A musician, a lumberjack, a serial killer? He gives her sort of a half smile and says, I was a lumberjack serial killer. Like he looks her straight in the eyes and says, I was a lumberjack serial killer. And then he's like, oh, ha ha, no, I'm an engineer. Now he's joking, but this is the only clue we get to his backstory. Obviously he is some sort of mechanic engineer person, but like maybe he was a serial killer. Maybe he's telling the truth to her in that moment. Cause you know, sometimes you want to share the truth and then you realize, no, I got to pretend like it was a joke because obviously she can't take that. But did you see the other deleted scene after they broke up when she calls him and she is Satan? Yeah, wow. That was when I was like, wow, this really is an anti-woman movie.

Yes, I'm glad they cut this out because she is depicted as so evil. And you're just like, no, Chris Pratt is evil. This is after she's learned his secret and she's really, really mad at him for waking her up. It was a deleted scene where she calls him on the video phone and she's acting all nice and drunk. And he's like, oh, she likes me again. And she's like, oh, I've been thinking and drinking, thinking and drinking. And then she suddenly turns evil and gets bathed in red light. And she's like, do you think I would ever talk to you if we weren't alone on this ship? Do you think I would ever go out with you if we weren't stuck here on this ship? Do you think I could ever love someone like you? And each time she asks the question, it like zooms in on his face and he's like a little more puppy dog eyed than before. And he's like, no. But then if you look at it from this perspective of like Chris Pratt, you know, from his perspective,

she's this terrible demon, which she doesn't understand. Like she's bathed in red light the whole time. And she's like, I know it's very intentional. I could never like I actually thought he was going to wake up at the end of that scene and it was going to be a dream. Is it time for Laurence Fishburne to do what he does best? Show up and die in a sci-fi movie? That's what he does. Yes, I do believe it's about time to do that. Jim Preston is all about manipulation and long haul plans. How do I know that? He spent the first half of this movie planning on how he would wake up Aurora. He read the whole manual. He spent a year planning this. We know he did that. And we are expected to believe that after she breaks up with him, He's just going to stop scheming? I think not. I think he has a plan to win her back and it's going to take all the scheming he's got. And that brings us to Lawrence Fishburne.

Yes. Can I ask you a question? In between this time when Lawrence Fishburne wasn't here and when he shows up, did Jim at any point trap Aurora in her room for two days so he could go and drill a hole in the engine? Yes, he did. That's what I thought too. right about now. I have a theory that Jim Preston actually manually woke up Gus. There was only one pod failure. So Jim Preston realized that to get Aurora Lane back, he would need to step up his game. Right. He'd need to redeem himself. And the only way to do that is to make a big problem. But he can't cause any huge problems because he doesn't have clearance access to the big places like the bridge or the engineering room. He needs a crew member wristband. And to get that, he needs to wake up a crew member but he can't get it if the crew member is still alive what's he gonna do kill a man gus gets them into the bridge using his wristband and tells them not to touch anything

what does jim immediately starts touching everything he's like press buttons well okay it's like yeah you are not a four-year-old you're a grown man don't touch those buttons this is a spaceship it's because he's been waiting to get in here for it's been like two years now he's itching to touch those buttons now it's possible he messes with more things in the bridge than what we see we're not watching him the whole time it's probable that he does now first thing when they get in the bridge Gus says that they are still on course and NAVCOM is still active now that is the confirmation of the fact that the only systems that aren't malfunctioning seem to be the important ones that jim couldn't access i wonder why maybe because those systems are the most redundant and well protected because they matter most they come out of the elevator off of the bridge and a robot falls from the ceiling as soon as they get out right on their heads almost like this place there

is some sort of like almost supposed to kill uh to kill for right because jim only needs gus's wristband he has to kill gus this robot was meant to kill gus but it missed now this is also the exact model of robot we saw him tinkering with and sabotaging earlier and using to spy on on aurora if only there was some other robot he could use to murder this man maybe with some form of liquid he could ingest i don't know yeah but he tells us that there are 15 robots that have been messed with now that's a pretty exact number he's been keeping quite a watch on these because he's the one who's been sabotaging them and messing with them that's why earlier in the movie we see him staring at this droid as it like goes into the wall because he's like huh i just programmed it to do that like he was testing them back then now aurora says the breakfast machine went crazy the same breakfast machine that we saw jim pressed and getting mad at and trying to break earlier in

the film he's like poking at it and hitting it and it just so happens to break right after jennifer lawrence stops giving him gold breakfast giving her his special breakfast yeah right we know he hates his breakfast he clearly busted that machine and then is when as you already alluded to aurora says she was trapped in her room for two days and jim preston feigning ignorance is like oh dear i didn't even know about that yeah sure yeah right after she punched him in the face and was considering like killing him. She gets locked in a room for two days. I mean, come on. Obviously, this was him getting back at her. He was like, she's dangerous. I'm going to lock her in a room for a little while, get her out of the way and also start sabotaging the ship a lot more. Definitely. I mean, even if you're just watching this movie casually, from her perspective, he would be the most likely culprit for that.

Like, I'm certain that she assumed he locked her in there for two days, right? Right. Also, that would have been a prime time, those two days for him to you know do the thing he needed to on gus's pod oh he did have an elevator problem a few moments ago like right before gus shows up where it's like the elevator drops and almost chops him in half but the thing is that happens when he is already in the elevator messing with it he has like a box of tools and stuff so clearly he was sabotaging that elevator maybe to kill someone like say the guy he just woke up who shows up right after that but it kind of went They actually triggered it prematurely, yes. So you're basically saying that Chris Pratt just had a bit of an elevator problem and Lawrence Fishburne is about to have a bit of a champagne problem, if you know what I mean. Yes. It also shows that Jim is willing to do very dangerous things to achieve his goals.

Gus sends Jim and Aurora to check out different levels. Gus goes down to the hibernation pods. Preston immediately meets him down in the hibernation pods. Gus asks, aren't you supposed to be checking out? your levels and he's like i'm finished he didn't check them he doesn't care he knows they're the problems that are on those levels because he caused them yeah okay so then gus tells us that jim preston's pod malfunction was just a simple failure where the clock chip burnt out okay i can buy that maybe that was an accident for gus's it was a whole bunch of systems all went wrong at the same time now that's obviously not just a coincidence that happens when someone is sabotaging your pod and waking you up gus mancuso goes to the bar with all of them he orders a drink from arthur we see him try to lift up that drink and he kind of spills it maybe he didn't drink it but we don't know he could have taken a sip from it at some point and so yeah it could be that this

is why he starts to get sick. Jim Preston. He hacked into Arthur, the bartender, and programmed him to poison Gus's drink. That's what you're saying. Yes, that's what I'm saying. And how do we know that he could do that? Well, he had Arthur's manual. And then later on in this movie, when Arthur is malfunctioning, he vaults over the bar, goes down to the base of Arthur, opens him up and knows exactly which chip to pull out to turn him off. Like he knows how Arthur works like in a moment of crisis he's ready canonically i can prove that he hacked into arthur so in the passengers vr experience which really supports your theory a lot basically it is an officially licensed vr video game that you can play in the passengers universe where you wake up as a passenger on the ship during the events of the movie it may be during them or it may be slightly after they don't actually say if it's after then chris pratt has murdered jennifer

lawrence if it's during i guess before he woke her up no we don't um so we don't see them as you know an old couple tending to the ship we just see a ship full of grass but anyway in passenger's awakening basically you're woken up just like chris pratt was woken up and the screen talks to you and it's like welcome to the avalon you know get ready you're in orbit around homestead too blah blah blah blah and as it's doing that chris pratt he keeps cutting over on the loudspeaker and saying hey hey listen to me this is ignore her this is not what's going on you got to get over and help me with this you find out as you continue that chris pratt tells you that he woke you up from stasis to help him because he is yes because you are the only um officially certified engineer on board who's qualified to handle like the m2 remote all-in-one multi-tool basically it's just the vr one that you're holding eventually he takes you into the bar where you meet arthur

and he tells you outright he says this is arthur the robotic bartender i hacked into him a long time ago and have been using him to get data out of the avalon subsystems he has done this it's canon it is confirmed in this officially licensed sony video game acted by chris pratt he hacked into arthur it's done arthur then does the thing from the movie where he slams his face on the table and freaks out and i was like wow they totally put that in vr i love it and then uh you have to turn him off and open him up and like fix one of the chips that burnt out in him so that's kind of fun you go through the pool area and oh no zero gravity happens and you get stuck in the water oh no why did you go in there the movie happened it's not a hallway there's only one door in chris pratt told you to go in there and he's like oh i hope while you're in there gravity he doesn't cut out that would be bad and then it does oh no he's doing it to you oh he's totally

doing these things so continuing on with gus he says there are systems shut down everywhere but no apparent connection but we know there is one connection and it's jim preston it's jim president shortly after this aurora is talking to gus and she accuses jim preston of murder she calls him a murderer i mean she's saying it metaphorically no she's talking about gus i think this is maybe a meta level hint that's like jim preston is capable of murder and gus says you're right aurora but the drowning man will always drag someone down with him telling us in no uncertain terms that this is a man who's willing to kill everyone else if he is going down he'll do anything yes he'll bring down the ship with himself then jim preston walks in with another robot that he just broke and happily announces this one makes 16. 16 robots I've destroyed. Stop breaking more robots. He's so proud of himself. Alright, gravity gives out. Gus is dying.

Even the engine and navigation systems seem to be having problems now. Coincidence that these protected systems are now suddenly having problems right after Jim finally got access to them? Gus is dying and they take him to the auto dock, which diagnoses him with 612 disorders and hours to live. And what does the autodoc prescribe him? Suicide pills. That's all it gives him. It's like, kill yourself. That's all it does. Who do you think might have told the autodoc to tell him that? Well, we'll see. Probably Jim Preston. Even if your hibernation pod malfunctioned and caused tons of problems in you, I think you would come out of it with tons of problems, but Gus was fine when he came out. Yeah, I mean, he had a cough. He's got a little cough, but he's been getting worse and worse, and I think it's because he got poisoned by Jim somehow. Yeah. Surely Jim Preston couldn't cause 612 disorders to kill this man.

Well, he didn't. We know that all the systems in the ship are malfunctioning because of Jim Preston. The autodoc discovers 612 disorders, or at least that's what it says, but we know it's malfunctioning because if you look at the 612 disorders that it diagnoses him with it scrolls through all of them and they're actually only about six disorders that have been copied a hundred times oh no jim and you got lazy i don't think these disorders are correct one of them is syphilitic aortitis which is the final stages of syphilis oh no jim gave him syphilis guys now before gus dies he gives jim preston the one thing Jim needs. A crew member ID wristband. Why wouldn't he give this to Aurora? Like she's so much more reliable and believable and you know, a good person than Jim. Right. Jim Preston says he needs Aurora's help to fix the ship and then grabs her hand and runs down the hall. Aurora asks,

can't we wake up some of the crew? She's finally thinking about the one thing they should have thought of to begin with. Jim Preston immediately shoots that down saying, we don't have enough time to wait for them to recover. He already got rid of one crew member. He has the only thing he needs from the crew members, so he certainly doesn't want another one screwing up. Why would I wake up more crew members? So weirdly enough, they reach a door that even Gus's wristband won't get them into. And Jim Preston suddenly knows how to open locked doors within seconds. Yeah, Jim Preston. But it means that he has presumably maybe been able to get in here before if he knows how to get in here already. Absolutely. So Jim Preston is very quick to say this is from the asteroid that hit us when he finds the holes in the ship he doesn't know that i think he comes in here sees the holes he drilled and says blames it on

something else this is from the asteroid that hit us quickly planting the idea of an asteroid into aurora's head then he's quick to say the ship has replacement parts for everything so he already had a plan for how to fix this to begin with but then he's willing to put his own life in danger by standing in front of the fire just to look like a hero. Is he really that crazy? Let's look at this scene. So he's really quick to know what to do. He replaces the computer's main processing core. And then he's like, I'm going to go out and be a big hero. This was confusing to me as well, how he diagnoses this problem, like within instance, because I could barely understand what was going on, even just watching the movie. And I wasn't having my adrenaline pumping in a life or death situation. There is a room of infinite fire. Apparently there's too much fire. there needs to be less fire and how do we get rid of some fire by venting it so they try to vent it

and he immediately knows that the specific vent door that they need to open won't open the fact that he knew to vent the fire and then knew that that door was what was the problem just like that it was kind of weird seems like a problem that he contrived but anyway this is the biggest part of his con he gives aurora gus's wristband because this is going to be important then he leaves as aurora tearfully says jim come back to me i can't live on this ship without you like he's really really going hard here he's gonna get her back and then he's mad at her for punching him so he set up a booby trap to shoot her in the arm he's so mad he gets her back i don't know necessarily if he set up a booby trap in that room i mean i guess in a manner of speaking he did because he's been sabotaging the ship i do think it's having an actual problem and i think aurora is actually the only one in danger here.

Jim is supposedly outside in space. I do think he actually went out to space on a spacewalk. I don't think he's actually fighting off a dragon with a shield. But they're on the comm link with each other and Jim asks, what's wrong when Aurora screams? She lies and says, it's nothing. When Jim encounters a problem, instead of telling her it's nothing, he specifically tells her, I'm being a self-sacrificial hero. He's like, I have to hold the door open. He describes exactly what he's doing. Yes. He's like, for some stupid reason, this door, which is supposed to automatically vent the magical fire, won't open by itself. And when I open it manually, I have to hold it open and stand in front of the fire. It's the dumbest, stupidest, most contrived thing. It's so stupid, and I don't think it's happening. I think this is Aurora. He's telling her what's happening, and she's imagining it. She's like, now I can't live without you, Jim.

I won't open the door. And he's like, you have to do this. my life isn't as important as the people on this ship i'm so great and cool and the whole time he's like grunting and screaming all for her benefit at when she opens the lever he's like oh the flames yeah yeah he doesn't say that it does nothing but when he's like kind of screaming and grunting as he's supposedly blocking the fire why does he even have the comm channel open it's because he's putting on a show for her definitely well and that heat shield that he has even if it worked which it wouldn't but even if it worked first of all it would have melted his legs and second of all it's not covering the top of his head or the bottom of his feet and legs so he would have had his scalp and his feet melted off and also there would have been no heat shield left because how do heat shields work when a ship is re-entering the atmosphere it does have an actual heat shield in

real life spaceships have heat shields what do they do they burn up that's their entire job is to burn up so that the ship doesn't if his heat shield was working it would be gone by the time he's done here it's not gone it's perfectly intact and he pushes off of it later to save himself so his shield is a little suspicious yeah no i agree i think there's only two explanations for this either jim is a psychopath and none of this happened and he's just narrating this to aurora and she's imagining it or it's a badly written contrived ending to a movie just to redeem some irredeemable prick yes that or the third possibility that we already discussed this is an adaptation of sleeping beauty and it exists yeah sleeping beauty he's fighting the dragon with magic shield wow kill my episode all right so after he saves the day he narrates all the things that are happening for aurora he says i got blown out of the tube my tether's broke i can't come

back to the ship now i think that all he was doing was out in space with his tether attached and he only detaches it when aurora comes out just to put on this show for her so she can rescue him so he's like this is a really an ingenious plan because not only does he make himself the hero he makes her the hero save him and then he's her patient and you got that florence nightingale thing going on where she falls in love with him because she takes him back to the auto dock but like isn't this really dangerous well we know that jim preston as we've seen before was suicidal on his first spacewalk so he's not necessarily afraid of danger or dying he's crazy well and he was practicing we saw him practice this he practiced this with aurora he taught her how to go out on a spacewalk and hold on to him which is what she does here all right so she takes him to the auto dock which we know has been tampered with the auto dock is like he's dead

i can't resuscitate him no without someone's wristband authority which makes no sense it says it needs a real doctor to do a life-saving exercise you would think that a life-saving exercise would be one of the few times when you could override that for an emergency if the guy is dead he's not going to get more dead if the computer messes up because a human isn't there it's true but generally they don't like torture dead bodies just on the off chance it will come back to life so aurora disagrees but it doesn't matter because jim preston is not actually dead he set this up we know he has the auto doc manual he can control it and that's why he gave her the wristband so she could be the hero and then even after she tries to resuscitate him jim puts on this show of pretending to be dead he's gonna make her feel how he felt he's gonna make her feel the guilt she called him a murderer well he's gonna show her how it feels to not be

able to save someone. He's going to turn her into this pathetic crying, wracked with guilt. And only then does he come back. And then as soon as he opens his eyes, she's all giddy with excitement. She climbs on top of him and starts kissing him. Either this is a ridiculous male wish fulfillment fantasy, or he's an evil genius who conned her into loving him. The second one. The second one. That's the one. Okay. So how does she and the Autodoc revive him? Do they, I don't know, defibrillate him? Is that what they do? she does all the things there's like everything she does everything she defibrillates him she injects him with i don't know adrenaline they do like a ton of things that don't exist now but maybe will exist in the future like all kinds of different therapies all kinds of different right yes some sort of stem cell injection crap so they do all kinds of stuff and that specific scene that is taken directly from the sleeping beauty fairy tale so i'm going to read

you a paragraph this is when um sleeping beauty when aurora dies because she got her hand pierced by the spindle when she falls asleep the entire household staff finds her they gather around princess aurora and here's all the things that they try to restore her they dashed water on her face they unlaced her i assume that means her corset they slapped her hands they tickled the soles of her feet they burned feathers under her nose they rubbed her temples with hungary water they held consultations over her by twos and threes i assume that's like a seance i don't know and again in grand committee but nothing would bring her to and as reading that i was just like whoa they literally took every possible resuscitation technique in the book and did everything and i was like that's kind of interesting because i was comparing that to like nowadays, I was like, would the doctor just literally freak out and do everything if a patient

died? No, he probably wouldn't like splash water on their face, tickle his feet, burn feathers under their nose. And then I was like, but that is what they did in Passengers when Chris Pratt died. She literally pushed the do everything button. And if Jim Preston was actually dead and the auto doc was working and did all these things to him, I don't think it would work to resuscitate him i think it would probably kill him bad for him so yeah that's more evidence totally sleeping beauty though there you go we proved yeah no that's good sleeping beauty evidence good job so quick question he was willing to put his life in danger by detaching himself and flying out into the unknown forever furthermore he poked a hole in his suit and froze to death like he was willing to freeze because he's definitely frozen when she pulls him back in yeah no i think maybe he just uh uh gosh there's got to be something he didn't do that until she had a hold of him

that was the sherry on top he's like okay she's got me now i'll punch a hole in my suit and it'll look like i'm frozen yeah or it could be that you know he knows where all the storage containment places are he knows where they keep the plants the precious metals everything he might have just gone into the freezer for a few minutes because like he wasn't out there fighting the dragon as we already discussed he could have just been standing in the freezer for a bit so he looks frozen and then he gets into the suit which is insulated so it would keep him looking frozen for a little while and it doesn't insulate the frost on his skin from the warmth of his body quiet no well no the suit is really high tech it probably has some form of of uh temperature control of liquid nitrogen spraying on the person inside and then so but also he did not detach himself until he saw her come out he was saying he was

detached but he actually wasn't and she still almost missed him he's very lucky she managed to grab right but as we know he must have been questioning his decisions with her with tethers earlier but you know worse things worse if she missed wow she's gonna feel really guilty and at least she'll live for the next 90 years with that guilt there you go well and if he can't get her back he doesn't want to live anyway he's obsessed with her well i mean fair enough like he's stuck on the ship for 90 years or is he are we about to find out about a way out we are but first it's almost over and before we find out about this way out it's not before they get rid of all the evidence of what jim did aurora is fixing everything including the bartender and jim is getting rid of the body of the man he murdered he shoots gus out into space where his body can never be examined and no one can find out that jim poisoned him but yeah they get back and he's

like look there's a stabilize and suspend option in the auto dock one of us could be stabilized and sleep the whole way but only in the single auto dock the one auto dock on this giant ship um even though i said previously that there are replacement parts for everything in the ship that's a little problem and he once again turns himself into this self-sacrificial hero like i'll stay you go back to sleep. And supposedly she says, no, I'll stay with you. But we don't know if that really happens. Are you ready to hear my alternate ending that completely fixes this movie? Tell me the alternate ending and then we'll sum up these theories. So I came up with an alternate ending to this movie, which is all I see whenever I watch it. I don't even see the real ending anymore. Chris Pratt goes out to fight the dragon. He puts up his heat shield. He holds the door open and he's burnt to a crisp. He dies, but he saves the Halcyon and he leaves Aurora all alone on the ship.

She's feeling vindicated, but sad. She's anguished. She's, you know, lashing out and crying. And then we see her start to get more silent, start to go through the motions, kind of let herself go. Maybe she stops shaving. Maybe she starts drinking. And then the movie ends with her sitting in the pod bay staring at a pod with a handsome guy in it and then she looks down at the tools and then she raises the tools up and the screen goes black that's the end of the movie that's how the movie ends she became jim she was just like him that would have been a far better ending dude that's how the movie ended as far as i'm concerned like that's a good oh man that's that's what i imagine every time i watch it i love it it's such a good ending all right so to sum up was passengers a modern sci-fi retelling of sleeping beauty yes obviously i blew your mind with that long ago it's it's because it's totally true and i i can't believe i missed it and i hope

that our listeners will feel the same way because like man this is obviously a sleeping beauty it's leave in beauty in space. It totally is. Do you believe Jim Preston is an evil scumbag who murdered Gus and sabotaged the ship just to get Aurora back? And also that the only actual malfunction that happened was his pod breaking down and nothing else on the ship was an accidental malfunction. Okay. That's a lot to take in, but let's go through it step by step. Okay. As far as Jim Preston being an evil scumbag. He very purposefully and with intent, like he had plenty of opportunity to think it over and decided to let her out of her pod, even though he knew it meant dooming her. He is a horrible person. And then next question. Did he sabotage the ship? Yes, decidedly so. We know that he was tinkering with the elevators. He was tinkering with the robots. He was tinkering with the food dispensers. He was

tinkering with the doors. Next question. Does it seem to you like there is something fishy about Gus's death? Yes, there's something fishy about his death. Like it doesn't make sense. It feels like he woke up as the Dick Holleran plot device to basically just kind of like throw in a guy dying and making it serious and also giving them a quick way out while he dies. So yeah, something's weird here. Well, there we go. Theory confirmed. We did it. We've ruined Passengers very thoroughly. Even if you don't believe our theory, you've got that alternate ending. And listeners, if there are any other movies that you like that you would want us to ruin for you, just let us know. You can talk to us on Twitter at Popcorn Isn't Real. Yes. And if you like us ruining these movies, please remember to rate us, subscribe, follow us, tell your friends about us. Music for this episode is provided by Christine. And remember, the popcorn isn't real.