Nothing is more tragic when a movie is sabotaged by its own marketing, misunderstood by critics, and ultimately rejected by audiences who felt they had been victims of a bait-and-switch. Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt starrer 2016 sci-fi film Passengers was on the receiving end of these three heartbreaks. It was a film which, in all honesty, didn't have a very genre-bending story, but it was smart, had a melancholic tone, and it was morally complex. Passengers was released with the full force of a holiday blockbuster push, only to be met with a deeply polarized and often hostile reception.

The conversation around the film's release was dominated by the story's central ethical problem, and the film was quickly written off as a creepy and misguided failure. However, nine years later, Passengers need to be re-evaluated. The story's moral ambiguity was not a flaw; it was its most interesting feature. It was a challenging and visually stunning character study about the terrifying power of human loneliness, a film that asked difficult questions and refused to provide easy answers. Passengers was a stealth masterpiece, a thoughtful and daring sci-fi drama that was simply misunderstood by the very audience it was trying to reach.

Passengers Dared to Ask Uncomfortable Questions

At its heart, Passengers is not a romance; it's a deeply uncomfortable experiment in human connection. The story's most controversial element is its premise, which surrounds a malfunction on a 120-year space journey. A single passenger, Jim Preston (Chris Pratt), wakes up 90 years too early. Faced with the prospect of living and dying completely alone, and after a year of spiraling into a deep, suicidal depression, he makes a terrible, selfish, and unforgivable choice to wake up another passenger, Aurora Lane (Jennifer Lawrence), effectively sentencing her to the same fate.

Now, this basic plot has, for years, been a point of contention, as the film's harshest critics have argued that the story tries to justify or romanticize this action. Some viewers and critics even labeled the movie and the character of Patt as stalkerish and sociopathic. However, a closer look reveals the film does the exact opposite. It spends its entire runtime exploring the dark and complicated consequences of this single, morally wrong decision.

At one point, Keanu Reeves was reportedly attached to play Chris Patt's character Jim, and actresses like Emily Blunt, Reese Witherspoon, and Rachel McAdams were considered for Aurora before Jennifer Lawrence ultimately signed on.

The script by Jon Spaihts and the direction by Morten Tyldum, who also directed the Oscar-winning film The Imitation Game, are not interested in making Jim a hero. He is obviously a flawed character who does something out of desperation, which is what the story is exploring. The creators are interested in exploring the profound and terrifying power of human loneliness. The film's first act is a gut-wrenching study of a man completely unraveling from total isolation, a situation that mirrors real-world psychological studies on the human need for connection.

Jim's decision to wake up Aurora is not presented as a romantic gesture, but as the desperate, flawed act of a man who has broken down. The rest of the film forces the audience to sit in the uncomfortable space of that decision. It asks a series of uncomfortable questions: Can a relationship built on such a dark foundation ever be real? Can forgiveness be earned for a crime that can never be undone?

The film's moral ambiguity was mistaken for a narrative endorsement, but the story was never trying to say that what Jim did was right. It was trying to explore what happens after someone does something unforgivably wrong. Passengers were exploring the consequences of a decision taken out of desperation. The story doesn't want the audience to root for Jim; it wants them to witness him taking the fallout of his terrible deed.

While speaking to The Film Stage, director Tyldum addresses the comparison of Chris Patt's character to Jimmy Stewart's character in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. He said:

"When you have characters who make questionable moral choices, you need to identify with them. I think I would've done what Jim does and I think most people would. It's interesting to be part of that journey. As soon as you understand him [Jim] it doesn't become creepy."

Passengers Was Killed By a Misdirected Marketing

In Trailers, the Film Was Sold as a Space Romance

The biggest enemy of Passengers was not its story, but its own marketing campaign. The trailers and promotional materials that were released ahead of the film were deemed misleading and misdirected by many, selling a completely different movie than the one the filmmakers had actually made. Apparently, the marketing team's solution to sell a big-budget, star-driven sci-fi film about a deep moral crime was to simply hide the film's core premise.

The trailers for the film, which are still available to watch, were cut to look like a quirky space romance adventure of survival where Patt and Lawrence are the Jack and Rose of a sinking Titanic, which is, in this case, a spaceship. The trailer even included a dialogue in which Lawrence says, "You Die, I Die," mirroring Titanic's "You Jump, I Jump." In short, they focused heavily on the charming chemistry between Pratt and Lawrence, the stunning visuals of the spaceship, and the later action sequences.

During an interview, while reflecting on her career, Jennifer Lawrence shared that her close friend and artist Adele warned her about signing Passengers, saying, "I feel like space movies are the new vampire movies."

Crucially, the marketing completely omitted the fact that Jim intentionally wakes up Aurora. The trailers made it seem as if both characters had woken up by accident, and that the story was about two people finding love while trying to survive a crisis together. The tone was adventurous and romantic, not quiet and morally complex. As a result, audiences went into the theater expecting a straightforward sci-fi love story and were instead confronted with a deeply uncomfortable ethical dilemma in the first act.

The alleged bait-and-switch eventually became the primary reason for the critical and audience backlash. The feeling of being misled created a sense of hostility that the film could never recover from. It was being judged as the movie it promised to be, not the movie it actually was. The story was designed to be a challenging drama, but it was sold as an easy-to-digest romance, and that marketing decision ultimately sabotaged its reception.

Additionally, some of the early critical reviews of the film allegedly created a buzz about a certain section of the plot, which was picked up by other media, eventually harming the reputation of the film's true essence. During an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Producer Neal Moritz discussed one such review, which he deemed was really unfair to the film. He said, "Ten days before that movie came out, the first review came out... the reviewer said that we were justifying date rape, and I was like, what? One guy said that, and a lot of the media picked up on that, and it became the mantra that the film carried, and I thought it was a really unfair thing because I think it's a beautiful film, I couldn't be more proud of."

Passengers Is a Film Worth Revisiting

If one can strip away the controversy caused by the misleading marketing or the whole controversy surrounding its plot and characters, what remains is a thoughtful piece of science fiction. On a technical level, Passengers is a stunning achievement. The production design of the spaceship, the Avalon, is gorgeous and detailed, feeling both futuristic and believable.

The elegant and often haunting musical score by Thomas Newman perfectly captures the film's themes of loneliness and wonder. And the clean, crisp cinematography creates a sense of both the immense scale of space and the suffocating isolation of the ship. The film is a visual and auditory treat, a piece of high-concept sci-fi made with an incredible level of care that was largely overlooked during the initial discussions.

The performances of Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence also deserve a second look. Pratt, in particular, delivers one of his best performances in the film's first act, carrying that section single‑handedly before Lawrence's character wakes up and joins. He believably portrays a man slowly and painfully unraveling from complete solitude. Lawrence also skillfully navigates a very difficult role, taking her character from righteous fury and disgust to a complicated acceptance of her situation.

In the years since Passengers' release, a number of other elevated sci-fi films have explored similar emotional territory and have been much more warmly received. Films like Ad Astra and The Midnight Sky, and even shows like Moon, have been praised for their meditative explorations of cosmic loneliness. Passengers were a clear precursor to this trend.

It was a film that wanted to have a serious conversation about difficult themes, but it was released in a blockbuster package that the audience at the time was not prepared for. If it were released today, in an era more accustomed to thoughtful, adult science fiction, it would likely be seen in a very different light. Screenwriter Jon Spaihts, in his interview with Slash Film, shared what he wished for the intended audience's reaction to Jim's moral dilemma. He said, "I think the right conversation that's happening in the movie is the 'What would I do?' conversation. I think that's a fascinating question."

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Passengers

PG-13

Adventure

Sci-Fi

Release Date December 21, 2016

Runtime 116minuntes

Cast

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