Passengers: A Good Movie that Deserved to be a Great one

So, a little over a week ago, I took in the new science fiction film Passengers starring Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence. Despite being released on the heels of the highly anticipated Rogue One, there was still considerable hype surrounding this film. In fact, a friend of mine even told me that he was looking forward to it even more than Rogue One. Naturally, I was intrigued by the film so I opted to check it out for myself. What I found was that the film contained all the ingredients necessary for a good movie, it just failed to be the movie it could have been.

Before we get to where this movie went wrong, I want to outline what about this movie works. The premise of the film, which can be gleaned from the trailer, revolves around our two leads waking up from stasis on a star ship bound for a new human colony in the far reaches of space with ninety years left of the trip. With no way to return to sleep they need to rely on one another for survival. Now to an extent, that’s accurate, but there’s more to it than what the trailer shows you.

Initially, Chris Pratt’s Jim Preston wakes up alone. As anyone naturally would in his position, Jim begins to freak out, especially when he realizes that it would take twenty years for any distress call to reach Earth. Jim is a mechanic by trade, so using his technical expertise as well as some ship’s manuals, Jim does the best he can to try and fix his pod as well as get into the area where the crew is sleeping believing they may know a way to fix his situation, but unfortunately, he finds no success. Eventually, Jim comes to the conclusion that if he’s stuck in this unfortunate situation, he may as well make the most of it. To that end, Jim does what he can to enjoy the luxuries of the starship Avalon, including a swimming pool, extravagant restaurants, a movie theatre, a basketball court and even a variant of Dance Dance Revolution. However, luxury is scant comfort after a year of isolation no one to talk to save for a sophisticated yet socially limited robot bartender played by Michael Sheen. The film does a great job really showing just how crushing the loneliness has become for Jim. There’s a very well done montage in which you slowly see all the luxuries I mentioned becoming increasingly more hollow and empty until finally, he can no longer take pleasure in them. At one point, when he’s finally decided he can no longer take it, Jim even contemplates suicide by throwing himself into space. However, he then notices a pod containing Jennifer Lawerence’s character, Aurora Lane, an author and journalist from New York. Slowly, Jim begins to grow obsessed, learning about Aurora through the ship’s manifest and her own writings. For the first time in over a year, Jim no longer feels alone, and he begins to contemplate waking Aurora up.

To the film’s credit, they make it clear that waking up Aurora is not a decision that Jim makes lightly. He spends weeks, perhaps even months, wrestling with his conscience. He knows that what he’s considering is wrong, but when faced with the alternative of spending the rest of his life in soul-crushing isolation, he ultimately decides to wake Aurora up, knowingly condemning her to his fate. Again to the film’s credit, after he finally wakes her up, there’s a great scene where he runs back to his cabin looking like he’s about to throw up as the realization that he cannot reverse what he’s done sets in. I like that the film doesn’t gloss over the fact that what Jim did was monstrous, but still manages to frame it in such a way that you can understand why he did what he did and perhaps get you wondering if you would do the same in his position. Jim’s not a bad man, he’s just a man who did something terrible out of loneliness and desperation.

From there on out, the film focuses on Jim building his relationship with Aurora and Aurora coming to terms with her fate, Jim keeping the nature of her pod’s malfunction a secret for obvious reasons. They do have great chemistry with one another and they’re relationship is allowed plenty of time to grow and develop naturally. However, the truth is eventually revealed and while I ordinarily can’t stand cliché “liar revealed” scenes, the scene in which Aurora finds out that Jim woke her up is a phenomenal bit of acting from Jennifer Lawrence. To say she gets angry would be a disservice to the scene. You get angry when someone cuts you off in traffic or steps on your foot with a heavy boot. Sure you’re upset, you may even want to retaliate, but eventually, you get over it and move on with your life. What Aurora feels is beyond just anger. She’s sick to her stomach. She can’t see straight. She has been betrayed by someone she’s grown to love and trust and what’s more, she’s realizing that that very love and trust was built on a lie. There is no getting over this and moving on with life for Aurora, because thanks to Jim, she no longer has a life to move on with. Even when later on Jim pours his heart out to try and apologize and explain why he did what he did, but she refuses to hear it. She doesn’t care why he did it, all she knows is that he did it, and there’s no taking it back. In one powerful scene, Aurora enters Jim’s cabin while he’s asleep and starts beating him senseless. When she picks up a crowbar and tries to kill him, Jim lays back, puts his hands up and gives her a look as if to say, “you may as well, there’s nothing I can do or say that can make things right.”

Now’s a good time to mention that throughout the film, there has been foreshadowing that there is something very wrong with the ship. Every now and then, something will malfunction, getting worse and worse as time goes on. It was only a matter of time before another pod malfunctions, but fortunately, this one belongs to a member of the crew, Deck Chief Gus Mancuso, played by Laurence Fishburne. Unfortunately, Gus’s pod malfunction was so severe that he is now terminally ill, but with the time he has left, he’s going to do everything in his power to help Jim and Aurora save the ship from going down and save the lives of the thousands still in stasis. Fishburne’s role in the film serves two purposes. First, it’s to allow our main characters access to parts of the ship they were unable to access before, which will prove vital in saving the ship. Second, he’s there to provide an outsider’s perspective on the Jim and Aurora situation. There’s a nice scene where he makes it clear that he doesn’t condone what Jim did but understands why he did it.

Unfortunately, Gus dies and it’s up to Jim and Aurora to save the ship. In my opinion, this is where the film starts to go wrong. As I’m watching the climax, two possible endings to this movie present themselves in one’s head. At one point, Jim has to sacrifice himself in order to save the ship. The ending that formed in my head was that Jim would die, redeeming himself by saving the lives of thousands, but sadly condemning Aurora to the same fate he once suffered. The final shot of the film could have been Aurora, overcome by loneliness by Jim at the start of the film, staring at someone else’s pod, contemplating waking them up, now understanding the desperation that caused Jim to wake her up in the first place. That might have been a bit cynical, but that sounds like a profound and provocative ending that would have fit with what was established.

We don’t get that ending.

No, instead, Aurora saves Jim at the last minute and revives him in the ship’s medical bay. But, it’s here where the movie presents us with a much better ending. While examining the medical bay using Gus’s crew clearance, Jim finds a means to use the healing chamber for medical stasis. In essence, he’s found another means of putting someone back in their pod. The downside, there’s only one medical chamber. Without hesitation, Jim decides that it should be Aurora. This would have been a great way to end the film. Jim is willing to condemn himself to isolation again in order to correct the horrible mistake he made. He may not be able to earn her forgiveness, nor does he seem to wish to, but at least this way, he is able to put things right and undo the harm he visited upon Aurora. The movie then could have ended with Aurora waking up at the proper time and discovering some kind of message for her left by an aged Jim before his death.

We don’t get that ending either.

You want to know the ending we do get? Aurora refuses to go into stasis and decides to stay with the man who forced her into this situation without her consent and then lied to her about it and then they lived happily ever after. And to add insult to injury, the end credits to the film are accompanied by an upbeat pop song. Pardon my language, but this movie can blow me! It’s especially frustrating because, as I hope I’ve made clear, this was a really well made and well-acted film. The two leads are more than up to the task of carrying the film on their shoulders. The set up is intriguing and holds your attention and the moral questions raised make for excellent topics of discussion. But this ending taints the film if not flat out ruins it. This not a movie that should have had a Hollywood happy ending. All that time spent making it clear that Jim’s actions were horrible and monstrous, and he ends up being forgiven by the person he wronged in an unforgiveable way. All that time Aurora spent in blinding fury about her life having been effectively stolen, undone in a moment of character assassination. Aurora has been offered her life back, and she refuses so she can spend the rest of her life alone with a man who deceived and manipulated her, when all logic and common sense dictates she shouldn’t. This ending isn’t just bad, it’s insulting. Worse yet, the final scene in the film shows the crew waking up to find that Jim and Aurora have turned the ship’s main concourse, and presumably other parts of the ship, have been converted into lush forests. (Earlier in the film, Jim found a way to plant a tree on the concourse) That’s all well and good, but there’s no way that this is good for the ship. We see that they repurposed several of the ship’s resources for their own survival, but it’s been eighty-eight years. By now, Jim and Aurora have likely been dead for decades, so we can then infer that the resources that the crew needs to survive have been continuously running without maintenance for at least twenty years. The crew and the other passengers are probably screwed. How are they going to survive? We never find out. But it’s okay, because Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence got to live happily ever after.

In conclusion, Passengers was a frustrating film, especially because there was so much about it that really worked. We could have had a great work of sci-fi, and to an extent, we did, but unfortunately, the work is trapped within a sub-par romantic comedy.