#Passenger movie movie
And as the ship itself begins to deteriorate, requiring Jim and Aurora to call a tentative detente so they can work together to save it, the movie implicitly makes a horrifying argument: "It’s a good thing Jim fucked Aurora over so badly, because without her help, the whole ship would have been doomed!" Together, they fix the MacGuffin Machine, Jim almost floats off into the infinite blackness of space, and Aurora risks her own life to bring him back.Īnd in the end, Aurora doesn’t just risk her own life to save Jim-she gives it up to be with him. When Aurora explains what Jim did to her, Gus is quick to sympathize with Jim, mansplaining that she really needs to think about how hard the whole thing has been from Jim’s perspective. Eventually, a third passenger awakens: Gus Mancusco, a no-nonsense crewman played by Laurence Fishburne. Instead, the movie opts for the Hollywood ending. Either way, the movie would have been honestly grappling with the extraordinarily ugly truth the entire narrative is built around. In that version, the movie could have acknowledged Aurora’s decision for the brutal no-win scenario that it is, embracing the tragic complexity of why Aurora might choose to forgive and forget what Jim did, because the only alternative is spending a lifetime alone. If that full-on confrontation between Jim and Aurora felt like a step too far, Passengers could have swung into existential horror instead of overt horror. The movie implicitly makes a horrifying argument: "Good thing Jim fucked Aurora over so badly, because without her help, the whole ship would have been doomed!" And told this way, Pratt’s innate likability could have been a secret weapon in the movie’s arsenal-earning him our natural sympathy before revealing that he was the villain all along, and making Aurora into our late-coming protagonist, forced to pit herself against this appealing but ultimately despicable man. Again, bizarrely, Passengers seems to hint that this is the natural direction for the story to go: Arthur, the bartending robot played by Michael Sheen, is clearly modeled on the bartender from The Shining.
Suddenly, we’re in the middle of a sci-fi riff on The Shining: a woman stuck alone with a man who’s clearly not who she believed him to be. In the wake of the revelation, Jim takes to the ship’s communication speakers to attempt an apology, and it is genuinely skin-crawling to watch Aurora stuck, alone, with no way to block out the simpering voice of her captor. Trapped on the ship with Jim, Aurora would have had her own painful choice to make: spend a lifetime alone, by avoiding Jim or killing him-or make some kind of peace with this handsome, genial creep who selfishly and secretly rewrote the entire course of her life to suit his personal desires. We’ve taken a sudden pivot from romance into horror movie-and executed correctly, that’s exactly how the third act would have played out. And this is where Passengers could have gotten really bold.
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