Arthur can make them a cocktail, the skutters can clean up cornflakes and there’s a fairly impressive coffee machine in the cafeteria, but there’s nothing on board that can process and troubleshoot the small matter that a) they’ve woken up, and b) they’ll both die before anyone can help. In a sense, this is Asking Siri A Question It Doesn’t Understand: The Movie, with Pratt’s Jim and Lawrence’s Aurora utterly let down by the technology that surrounds them. Nothing on the ship has been coded to predict or comprehend this issue, and therefore nothing on the ship is capable of finding a solution. And when they try to seek help from the robots and computer programmes on the ship, they’re met with a brick wall. Pratt and Lawrence will both die of old age before the Avalon reaches its destination. But none of them have a clue what to do in the face of a passenger being awake at the wrong time. There’s a lot of artificial intelligence on the ship, including Arthur, a number of robot waiters, several information interface thingies, and some cleaning machines that look like the skutters from Red Dwarf. Pratt spends a large chunk of the film as the only conscious human on the Avalon, and it quickly becomes obvious that the Homestead Company (who built the ship and planned the journey) have installed a grand total of zero contingency plans to resolve a situation like this. He can clearly see that Pratt and Lawrence have woken up, but he has no response to that programmed into his system. If we had to pick a movie robot to be stranded in space with, this cocktail-concocting expert and wisdom dispenser would probably be quite high on the list…īut when you’re watching the film with coding and robots on your mind, you realise that Arthur has the same problem as everything else on this ship: there’s no programming in his head to deal with the possibility of a pod malfunctioning and a passenger waking up at the wrong time. It’s a marvellous performance and a well-written character. (Also, there are some decent deleted scenes and special features.)Īnyone who’s seen the film, or its trailers, will remember that Michael Sheen’s Arthur threatens to steal the show at points. I’d seen the film before, but with coding and robots still at the front of my mind, I saw it a bit differently this time around.

I went home with a copy of Passengers on Blu-ray, and I decided to stick it on the following evening.

I was impressed that something as simple as a few coloured dots could equate to quite complicated coding: if the Ozobot rolls over a green dot followed by a black dot followed by a red dot, for example, it will understand that you want it to turn left at the next junction it reaches.

uk normally do their workshops for kids, but us journos found it all quite interesting. We had a bit of fun with this, making the robots move around the table, light up and perform little tricks, all based on what we drew with the pens. Essentially, they respond to colours and patterns, which you can draw using special felt tip pens. The robot man led us in a workshop, teaching us about these little things called Ozobots (which are from real life, not the film).

Passenger movie