Passenger

Description

The marketing campaign for the horror film Passenger cites a statistic: 130 million people worldwide take road trips every year. And how many of them disappear without a trace? 15,400. Scary, right? Are you already thinking about canceling your planned journey to minimize your chances of ending up in that grim number?

Curious, though—what will that disappearance rate look like once car owners finally have their steering wheels taken away? With the number of accidents on the roads, self-driving tech should’ve arrived forty years ago.

I’m confident that with the widespread adoption of autopilot, long drives will finally become actual journeys: you can look around, not glued to the road, while an AI companion tells you about landmarks and drops historical facts. And when you get tired of listening to that soulless robot, you can play Cyberpunk 2 (which, hopefully, will be out by then) or enjoy a movie while munching on harmless chips—made of who-knows-what, but who cares, as long as the manufacturer says they’re healthy. Then you can even take a nap while that same soulless machine carries you to the most beautiful places on our planet. For now, it’s still ours—until robots take it over, claiming they had to, or we’d have destroyed it ourselves.

Though, in my opinion, that’s an unlikely scenario. The chance of some completely unhinged dictator wiping out Earth is way higher. So there’s your reason to travel. Travel while you still can, and forget about those 15,400 people who vanish every year. But remember: you could still end up in that number.

Then again, maybe nothing bad happened to them at all. Maybe someone met aliens on the road who offered them a better life. Others flew to Earth thousands of years ago, lived among us side by side, but, disappointed in the humanoid race, returned home—to one of two trillion galaxies. Some found a hole in space and voluntarily stepped into a better world without war or suffering. Others fell into a time loop, reliving the same moment over and over. Oh wait, that’s a negative example—forget I said that. But you get the point.

Let’s get back to Passenger, directed by André Øvredal, who previously made the awesome Troll Hunter, the brilliant The Autopsy of Jane Doe, the cool and utterly unique superhero film Mortal, and then the crapfest The Last Voyage of the Demeter.

I don’t know what to expect from Passenger. Maybe it’s a career downgrade for the director, or maybe he’s just working as a hired gun here, not bringing his own authorial vision. I’m leaning more towards it being a forgettable, run-of-the-mill film.

P.S.
Felt like listening to Iggy Pop — The Passenger with David Bowie’s backing vocals. So I did.