The times you waste just watching television...

My wife was out of town this past weekend.  I didn't feel much like doing work, and I had already finished doing a few chores around the house.  So, I turned on the television to see what movies were playing.  I ended up watching two movies back-to-back.  It was probably a waste of time (especially as I had seen one of the movies once before at the local movie theater), but I did enjoy both movies.  The themes were fairly consistent, and I thought it would be worth talking more about them both here.

The first movie (which was the one I had seen at the movie theater) was The Martian, a 2015 movie starring Matt Damon, based on the book of the same name by Andy Weir.  Basically, Damon stars as astronaut (and botanist) Mark Watney, who is part of a NASA mission to the planet Mars in the year 2035.  The crew is forced to abort the mission and leave Mars emergently during a strong dust storm (it's more like a planetary cyclone).  Due to an incredible sequence of events, the crew believes that Watney is dead and leaves him behind.  Of course, Watney is not dead (the crew doesn't learn this until a few months later), and he is forced to improvise and adapt to his new environment on Mars (most of the equipment was left behind).  He ends up growing potatoes in the Martian soil (after building a farm inside the crew's surface habitat ("Hab"), extracts water from the hydrogen in leftover rocket fuel, and finds and uses the satellite communication equipment from the long since abandoned Mars Pathfinder mission probe to contact NASA's Mission Control on Earth.  Unfortunately, the next mission is not scheduled to come for another 4 years.  NASA tries to organize an earlier mission to re-supply Watney, but is unsuccessful.  I won't spoil how the movie ends, but needless to say, Watney ends up returning home to Earth. 

The movie's final scenes show Watney talking to a group of NASA astronaut trainees.  He is teaching them survival skills and makes the following statement, which I think applies more broadly to leadership in general:

At some point, everything's gonna go south on you and you're going to say, this is it. This is how I end. Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That's all it is. You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem and you solve the next one, and then the next. And If you solve enough problems, you get to come home.

Sounds pretty easy, doesn't it.  Solve a big problem by breaking it up into several smaller ones.  And then solve each small problem one at a time.  It's a strategy that certainly works in the movies, but I have also found that it works with real-life crisis situations too (and for that matter, everyday situations as well).  Anyway, it was a great movie to watch the second time.

The next movie was the 2016 science fiction movie, Passengers, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt (Laurence Fishburne and Andy Garcia make appearances as well).  It was either this one or the 1999 movie, The Mummy, which I have seen at least 1,000 times (figuratively).  After watching the movie trailer for "Passengers", I thought I would watch it instead.  The movie takes place in the future aboard a large spaceship that is transporting over 5,000 passengers and crew to a distant Earth colony called Homestead II (presumably there was a successful colonization of Homestead I).  Everyone is in deep space hibernation because the trip is supposed to take 120 years.  About 30 years into the trip, an asteroid collision causes damage to the ship and inadvertently wakes up one passenger, a mechanical engineer named Jim Preston (played by Chris Pratt).  Jim walks around the ship looking for everyone, eventually figuring out that (1) he is alone and (2) there is at least 90 years of travel left before anyone else will be waking up.  He spends the next year all alone, except for a lot of robots, holograms, and an android bartender named Arthur.  All good so far!

Jim gets very lonely and nearly goes crazy.  In his despair, he comes close to committing suicide by opening an airlock without wearing a spacesuit.  However, he ends up going back inside the ship, where he encounters a beautiful woman in one of the hibernation pods, Aurora Lane (played by Jennifer Lawrence).  He goes back and forth - even discussing the pro's and con's with Arthur - about whether to wake Aurora up from hibernation.  He reads all about her, learning that she is an author.  He even reads several of her stories.  He is alone and desperate for human companionship.  Still pretty good.

Well, at this point, based on the teaser trailer, I was thinking that Preston would wake up Aurora and then Arthur would go all HAL 9000 on everyone.  Together, the two humans would fight off the evil computer robots and save all of the humans.  Well, not quite.  It turns out the movie is a romance thriller!  Jim and Aurora fall in love (I sort of thought that would happen, but I was still waiting for the robot rebellion).  Aurora accidentally learns that it was Jim who woke her up, and not an accident.  She gets very angry.  They break up.  The ship starts falling apart.  They fix the ship.  They fall back in love.  End of story.  Sort of - I won't spoil it all for you.

Here is what intrigued me about this second movie, which was actually not a bad movie.  What would I have done in Jim's situation?  In other words, given the choice between dying alone (there was no way of going back into deep space hibernation) or waking someone else up, which essentially sentences him or her to death, which would I choose?  It's an interesting dilemma.  I can't imagine spending the rest of my life alone in deep space with nobody but an android bartender (albeit, a good one) to talk with.  However, I can't imagine putting someone else in that predicament either.  We all need human companionship, even if we crave solitude at times. 

So, at the end of the day, I enjoyed watching both movies.  I probably could have gotten a lot of work done, but some times it's okay to relax, unwind, and do nothing but watch some television.