ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

This is my kind of science fiction movie!

It depicts a bright, optimistic fuutre — but not so utopian that it seems too good to be true.

In this terrific movie, a beautifully designed colony ship is created to provide a wonderful environment for it's paying passenders — but an unforeseen event in space threatens to wreck the noble plans of the designers.

And yet, two passengers manage to find a way to survive . . . and they prevent the entire mission from failing!

Oh, wait a minute! I forgot to do something.

__ Spoilers! __ Spoilers! __ Spoilers!__

Hey, if you haven't bothered to watch this movie over the last seven years, you're not a real science fiction fan — so I've got no sympathy for ya!

___________ PASSENGERS - Official Trailer (HD)


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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[bulldogtrekker]

The Plot Of Passengers Seems To Be Based On This Old '50s Comic Strip
Jason Torchinsky, Spacelopnik

I admit, I have not seen the new movie Passengers. I have, however, read what the plot is about from various places, including this nicely detailed account. When I heard the basic story, it reminded me of something. Something I saw in an old book about spaceships. A comic. A weird, creepy, old '50s comic.

Since you sort of need to know what happens in the movie to appreciate any of this, there's about to be spoilers. So here's your warning! I'm going to spoil the crap out of the movie!

......Here's the basic storyline of the movie: there's a bunch of people on an interstellar spaceship making a 120-year journey to another planet to colonize. Since everyone on the ship is hoping to arrive while still metabolizing, the passengers are placed in hibernation, the kind of thing we've seen in space travel movies for decades.

So, everyone is in stasis in their pods when an astroid hits the ship and causes just enough damage to make one guy's pod, Chris Pratt's character, a technician on the spaceship, fail. It wakes him up a good 90 years too early, and the design of the pods means he can't just fix it and get back in.....

...Anyway, there's more that happens after this, but this is the crux that the whole plot is based on: guy wakes up way too early from hibernation, makes the decision to wake up a woman to be his companion, ....



Got it? Great. Now, look at this. It's a comic called 50 Girls 50 by Al Williamson and Al Feldstein published in the July-August 1953 issue of Weird Science.



This comic was actually the cover story of the issue, and you can get the gist pretty quickly: one guy, surrounded by 50 frozen hot '50s comic-book ladies, all his for the defrosting.

The comic tells the story of a guy named Sid, a technician on a spaceship sent on a 100-year journey to another planet. Sid's in charge of the Deep Freeze hibernation units, and he has a pretty devious plan: he's arranged to have his hibernation unit wake him up only two years into the journey, and then after that he's going to work his way through the 50 women on the ship, defrosting one a year, enjoying their company until he gets bored, then killing them and defrosting another.



Aside from the serial-rape-and-murder parts, this is essentially the same basic plot kernel as Passengers. Sure, Chris Pratt's guy was woken by accident, and he has no plans to work his way through the crew, becoming a serial killer and destroying the entire mission, but Pratt's character does make the same crucial decision to condemn someone to a lonely life and death.

The comic is actually way darker and more bizarre, with Sid actually plotting with one of the women on the ship to make everyone else slaves, but they double-cross one another and end up both dead, ....

I'm not the only one to notice this strange connection: the British website Metro also noted the 50 Girls 50 connection, but I haven't seen anything official from the studio to suggest that this was an acknowledged inspiration.

The screenplay was written by Jon Spaihts, who Wikipedia says is a 'go-to guy for space thrillers, and I have not found anything yet to suggest that he's even seen this old comic..

BDT: Somehow, I have read this story since I remember the rest of the story. His next girlfriend turns the tables on the man by stunning and re-freezing the man, which will kill him. The new girlfriend learns that all of the other men, including her lover, are dead from the man's prior actions. I suspect I read the comic in some kind of sci-fi print collection. I look forward to seeing the movie Passengers

LINK: http://jalopnik.com/the-plot-of-passengers-seems-to-be-based-on-this-old-50-1790446713

[Bud Brewster]

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This cover is insanely sexy, not to mention the lascivious premise of the story. Imagine the effect this story had on the hormonal red-blooded boys of American!

















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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Gord Green]

The art in this story is wonderful, especially in B&W.

The female figures are inked by the great Frank Frazetta and some of the mechanically intricate backgrounds are by Roy Krenkel.

Of course the space-babe cover is all by the MASTER , Wally Wood!

[bulldogtrekker]

Well, I finally saw Passengers and it is great ! The science fiction in the movie seems very believable. I have been told that the gravity created by the spinning rings is not accurate, but it looked fine to me.

[Gord Green]

This movie was the best hard sci-fi film I've seen in years!

The art from the EC story is particularly exceptional.

The best of the best from a great series that still holds up today!

Like this :

[Pye-Rate]

I watched Passengers last night and found it satisfactorily boring. Very pretty. Romantic, mostly but science-fiction? Really?

Fiction, very much so. Spaceship design by "Carnivals are Us". Built by "Hamster Wheel LLC". The only thing that keeps this ship from scraping itself is the screen it's displayed on. Damn thing is just a tinker toy with blinky lights.

No security procedures. No staff crew or way to contact the regular crew or officers. A WINDOW on a hot-fusion reactor.

This mission was designed to fail. A story written for feelings but no REAL action or solution, ya know "It's more important to have feelings in a crisis than to find a solution".

After I watched it, I could only say — deadpan — "Boo-hoo."
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The road to tomorrow runs through yesterday.

[Bud Brewster]

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I finally watched Passengers, and I enjoyed it very much.

Pye-rate . . . you're nuts.

I'm not saying it's perfect, but it is one of the most visually stunning movies I've ever seen! The sets, props, and special effects were created by brilliant artists and skilled designers.

How could a humble artist like me not love that?

The story is about an average guy in a terrible situation — and frankly, Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) is certainly no genius. We get that within the first few minutes after he wakes up from hibernation. He doesn't even seem very well trained when it comes to the colony ship he's on and the nature of its mission. He's apparently a "middle class" guy whom the original colonizers thought they needed on this amazing super-hi-tech colony ship.

This, I'm afraid, is entirely consistent with the way the upper class elite of our race seem to feel about all stable societies. I don't know if they're right or not.

One flawed aspect of the colony ship immediately occurred to me when I saw that the entire plot depended on a malfunction caused by an asteroid colliding with the ship's defensive shields while it plowed along through space at nearly the speed of light.

Here's the problem with that.

A spaceship cannot zip along at velocities close to light speed (much less even higher) and depend on force fields to protect it from large asteroids, small asteroids, meteoroids, space boulders, space pebbles, space dust grains, or even hydrogen ATOMS that collide with it at those insanely high velocities!

A spaceship needs something else to help it avoid these high-speed objects. It needs a detection system that "sees" these obstacles well before they collide with it and turn the whole vessel into an explosion caused by a fission reaction.

My two novels — The Wishbone Express and Sail the Sea of Stars — propose the use of something I called "jinn waves", which make it possible to instantaneously communicate across the galaxy. (Einstien predicted this with his theory of "quantum entanglement".)

Jinn waves allow starships to "see" what's ahead of them when traveling faster that light. Again, instantaneously.





Sound impossible?

Well, I certainly hope not. Because without that ability, our dreams of faster-than-light spaceships are less likely to become a reality than finding a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.

Traveling at velocities close to light speed (or faster) means the so-called "vacuum of space" would be just like riding a motorcycle through a hail storm at 90 miles an hour — buck naked!

Just ask the folks at the The Large Hadron Collider if teeny-tiny particles could damage a spaceship if they hit it as hard as the itsy-bitsy stuff they bombard matter with everyday!

Starships will need to see and avoid the obstacles in their path when they are too large for their force fields to deflect.

So, putting this whole idea into the most colorful terms possible, traveling through space like a bat-outta-hell means your spaceship has to have the skin of a rhino and the eyes of an eagle!

Anything less means you'll end up dead as a door nail!

For further information on this fascination subject, read my books.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[alltare]

[Gord Green]

Another solution would be for the generation of a "warp bubble" around the ship allowing it to travel "between" space avoiding all materials (And time.).



The ship would have a "warp generator" that works much as a magnet generates a magnetic field.

[Pow]

I enjoyed this movie & its marvelous production values.

The problem I had with it was the malfunctioning cryo pod.

I believe that there would be emergency protocols in such an event.

The Chris Pratt character is seen leafing through a thick manual attempting to repair his pod. That was the great plan this company had?

(1.) repair drones could fix the pod.

(2.) have empty pods ready in case of a problem.

[Bud Brewster]

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Not sure how that "ice shield" would work, but the warp bubble idea sounds good. I've often wondered if I was being unrealistic with the five spherical layers of energy shields I used in The Wishbone Express and Sail the Sea of Stars.

After all, at multiple speeds of light, how much deflecting could the shields do in the time it would take for objects (regardless of size) to reach the ship after hitting the outermost shield?

But with the "jinn wave" I described, which sees the atom-sized obstacles well in advance, the force fields become the last line defense.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Krel]

[Bud Brewster]

[alltare]

Those giant ice panels were frozen and formed on the planets' surface, then lifted to the orbiting space ship via space elevator where they were stacked up on the front end of the ship.

I don't recall the book's title either. It may be FOUNTAINS OF PARADISE or SONGS OF DISTANT EARTH.\