Unsettling Futures - Issue #8: Passengers was 70% of a good movie
One of the functions of criticism is to go back and reassess older works, to consider if the critical consensus of the day was correct. Maybe that book or film that was lauded at the time of its release is actually a bit hollow on reconsideration? Or maybe the title that landed without much initial interest is a hidden gem?
In that spirit, we are going to take another look at 2016's Passengers, the big(ish) budget SF romantic (?) drama starring Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt.
When it first came out, this film was derided as being everything from boring and trite, to reprehensible and misogynistic.
But is it secretly a good film, despite the 30% Rotten Tomatoes rating, the cascade of poor reviews, the collective audience reaction of "Meh"?
God no. It really is a turd.
But! Before it blows everything up, there were chances for this movie to be, if not great, at least pretty good.
Let us recap the plot:
Chris Pratt (I cannot be arsed to remember anyone's character names) wakes up suddenly from his suspended animation pod on a slower than light colony ship which (inexplicably) has a kind of luxury hotel wing for colonists to hang out in during the first/last couple of weeks of the voyage.
Unfortunately, he's woken up 30 years into a 120-year voyage. He can't figure out how to reactivate his sleep pod or how to wake up any of the crew.
What follows is the best part of the film, as Pratt spends about 20 minutes slowly cracking under the pressure of what is, essentially, solitary confinement, his only companion Michael Sheen's robot bartender. He tries to keep himself busy, considers suicide, grows a classic misery-beard, does a sad spacewalk.
Wandering the ranks of colonist pods, Pratt becomes obsessed with fellow passenger Jennifer Lawrence. He convinces himself that he's in love with her, and deliberately sabotages her pod to wake her up, lies about that, and then slowly eases her into their now shared life of isolation.
By the way, Pratt's character is some kind of mechanic/technical guy and Lawrence is a writer in her twenties, so of course the movie suggests that she's much wealthier than he is which… give me a minute here… HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! Oh, man, think I strained something there.
Anyway, blah blah blah, she slowly falls for him Beauty and the Beast-style, she finds out from the not-terribly-bright bartender AI that he woke her up on purpose, she rightly freaks out, slugs him, and isolates herself from him.
And this is where the movie runs out of ideas and turns into a bunch of weak action set pieces and trite "emotional" beats. The ship is breaking down, Lawrence Fishburne has a thankless cameo as a crew member revived just so he can drop dead five minutes later of exposition poisoning, Pratt has to do Dangerous Space Thingy to save the ship, he almost dies, Lawrence saves him.
At the end, Lawrence and Pratt learn they can fix up one pod so that one of them can go back into stasis to wake up on time at the destination planet, Pratt "nobly" offers it to Lawrence, and instead of her saying "Damn right, see you never, Creepy McStalkerpants" and climbing into that pod tout de suite, we cut to the end of the voyage where the colony crew (with an even more thankless Andy Garcia cameo) find evidence that Pratt and Lawrence lived out their lives together until they died, because it really was twoo lurve, I guess.
Bleah!
Here's the thing – there is nothing really wrong with the movie right up to the point where Lawrence finds out he was lying.
A lot of reviews focus on how despicable Pratt's decision is and… yeah, absolutely, even in this not-terribly-good movie that is the point. I dunno what to tell you, people can make awful, unforgivable decisions that are still understandable? ("Why aren't there more unlikeable characters!/No not like that!")
The movie does not stint on the desperation, depression, and isolation of Pratt's life before he wakes up Lawrence – he's alone for a full year, with either suicide or 50 more years of the same his two options. The movie also does not ever suggest that condemning her to a similar life of isolation is anything other than a bad thing (until the happy-ever-after bullshit end, which, as previously discussed, bleah!). Lawrence's best scenes are her realization that she's not just another victim of a technical malfunction, but that she's been betrayed and lied to.
The movie is honest up to this point. It then commits a second betrayal, of its audience, by suggesting that Pratt's act of heroic self-sacrifice to fix the ship can somehow also fix their relationship. It uses the discovery of his lie as the standard romantic comedy third-act misunderstanding that temporarily drives the lovers apart. Which is cheap and shitty on an unfathomable level.
So what should have happened?
There are a few options.
First, you could have done it grim-drama style. Keep jumping forward in time, weeks and months, maybe years, and show that despite the isolation, Lawrence reconnects with Pratt on some level simply to stave off the crushing loneliness, while never being able to trust or really love him, condemned to a kind of purgatory. That would have required extremely subtle writing, however.
You could also have Pratt go full Bluebeard. Shocking, but you could have them fight, and he kills her. Feels really bad about it? Maybe. Genuine guilt, or egotistical self-pity, depending on how you want to play it. But at the end of that cycle, you end the movie with him again perusing the pods, pausing next to one with another female passenger, calling up her video diary, suggesting that his cycle of loneliness/betrayal/murder would continue. An ugly ending? Yes. Definitely. But one that's at least earned by the story on some level.
Or, you could reverse that. Lawrence and Pratt fight. He goes full psycho. She defends herself, and kills him.
Okay, great. Threat gone. Betrayer vanquished. But now she's stuck exactly where he was at the beginning of the movie. Run her through a montage showing her doing most of the same stuff Pratt did in the first twenty minutes, slowly being crushed by the loneliness just as he was. And at the end, show her lingering by a pod, at least considering the same sabotage that doomed her. Leave it up in the air if she's strong enough to resist.
Then there's the idea I've seen floating around elsewhere – why not tell the whole movie from Lawrence's point of view? That would really change things up, turning it into a gothic space-mystery! But that probably leaves you back at the she-kills-him-what-now ending again…
(None of these story ideas are particularly reassuring. One of my core beliefs about science fiction is that it is a tool to create situations that put characters in extreme situations to consider aspects of human nature that are more difficult to explore in mimetic fiction. Look, this newsletter isn't called Fun and Reassuring Futures Where Everyone Is Happy.)
Passengers is a movie about dishonesty that lies to itself about what kind of film it is. It borrows the structure of a romantic comedy while telling a story about desperation and loneliness. Its cardinal sin as a story is that it doesn't make good on the promises it makes in the first twenty minutes.
It doesn't make good on those promises, because Hollywood. Because when you put two of the most bankable young, attractive stars of the decade together in a movie, the studio heads and the marketing department just want to see them kiss! Because they can sell that! They can, theoretically, sell that to a lot of people and make a ton of money. (Spoilers: They could not! People did not want to see Stalker!Pratt kiss Lawrence!)
I have complained here and elsewhere on these internets about how the endless train of remakes, reboots, and sequels is bad and stupid and I hate it. Passengers is a reminder that even with an "original story" the demands of Hollywood's money machine can crush anything good and interesting out of a project.
Any of the versions of Passengers I'd like to see – creepy space-gothic, Bluebeard story, endless cycle of loneliness and betrayal – could have been best made for under $5 million on plywood sets in a Toronto sound stage, starring no one you've ever heard of.
I don't know if mainstream Hollywood will ever have one of its periodic bursts of "fuck it, make whatever" creativity again – they only come along rarely – but maybe someday we'll see that. Maybe if one of the big fandom-linked franchises finally crashes and burns. Maybe if streaming fully consumes the big studios. Maybe if enough movies like Passengers fail.
Maybe then we'll get movies that care more about the promises of their story than the promises of the marketing department.
Obligatory end notes
Remember, if you liked this post, do not smash that like or subscribe button, fam! (Note to self: find out if fam is short for "family" or "familiar, witch's".)
If you liked this post, copy it out on parchment with a goose-quill pen. Go on your travels. By the side of the road you will meet an old beggar woman. Give her your last crust of bread, wrapped in this post. She will give you the secret knowledge of the language of birds.
Turns out they curse like sailors!
Up next!
Next time… which will be, uh, a couple of weeks? Maybe? I'm planning on looking at some of my favourite YA science fiction books from when I was a kid. And because I am old, no, it's not that smug little boy wizard. We'll be talking about Monica Hughes' Isis series, starting with The Keeper of the Isis Light. Do they hold up? I don't know! But my library has a collection of the whole trilogy!