I have a stash of “quiet” films that either have very little music, very low music, or are set to ambient music that I keep in the clip for low-energy days. “Passengers” is one such film, and I honestly think it has an undeserved bad rap.
First, let’s get the hand-wringing out of the way. Made during the height of the “we are sick of them” era of Prat and Lawrence, the main (rational) ire with the movie is the premise of the love story. And I mean…
Have we never seen a “man briefly sees woman, man becomes obsessed with woman, man drastically alters life of said woman to get her undivided attention” romance before? Honestly, it is Pratt’s morality clause that keeps most from liking the movie, because had it featured the logical amount of sex that two people stranded on a luxury ship should have had, we’d have called it a cult classic. It is basically 365dni: Space Odyssey. Moving on.
Anyone who has read my posts on romcoms knows one of my favorite tropes is “this is billed as a classic romance, but the romance is actually secondary/ a plot vehicle/ mooivation for the woman figuring out her own shit” and this is right up my alley because what?
Aurora is a writer. Not just any writer, a writer with lack of life- induced writer’s block, with a smattering of impostor syndrome. Jim liked her face, but fell in love with her words, He ends up being the one she wants to read her book, whatever it turns out to be, the most. He offers to step aside for her first love, The Words. And in the end, she chose him because what she had with him in the present was a better story than the one she had been writing for herself, a “what may happen” set in the future.
A very Gen X thing about me is my yet-to-wane addiction to games of the candy crush/ Royal match variety, and often I have to tell myself to play the game I have now, not the game I might have eight strategic moves from now- as we all know how that usually goes. This movie kind of reminds me of that. Aurora got on the ship with a 250-year plan, with the hopes that the future she’d wake up to would be more fulfilling than whatever she had going on in the present. And while some unfortunate choices were made for her, what she chose for herself in the end was a thing I can identify with- the better writing material.
“Passengers” is a tale about the stories we write ourselves, not a Space Beauty and the Beast. I mean, it is also that but at least they pulled it off in a way that made Pratt look decently attractive. Also, while I can’t prove this, I am convinced it was written with Katherine Heigl in mind. Jennefer has her exact cadence in it somehow and that in itself is highly entertaining. Anyway watch it again, or watch it for the first time, and prepare to ask yourself why you hated it or avoided it years ago.
**Also. The Academy needs to invent a new category called “mid-act-bomb-dropper” just so Lawrence Fishburne can win for his apparent hobby of coming in the 2nd or 3rd act just to fuck shit up, steal the whole movie and then die. Between this and “Predators” he deserves something.
My Table For One 