Earlier this week, Slate editor Sam Adams joked that “Passengers may be the first movie to be released solely in the form of thinkpieces.” He was responding to a wave of reviews of the science-fiction movie from director Morten Tyldum that expressed outrage over the film’s plot twist.
Passengers, which opens Wednesday, was advertised as a sweet drama about two people traveling to colonize a distant world who wake up earlier than they should have from their hibernation, dooming them to die before they finish their 120-year-long journey. Instead, though, it turns out that mechanic Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) woke up by accident after a meteor strike caused his sleep pod to malfunction, and after a year of loneliness, he made a conscious decision to awaken writer Aurora Lane (Jennifer Lawrence), effectively stealing her life so he could have company.
The way that Passengers deals with this plot twist is inconsistent in a way that has more to do with a bad script than bad politics. Jim genuinely does agonize over his decision and recognize that he’s doing a bad thing. But rather than deal with the magnitude of what he’s done to her, Passengers redeems him with standard movie acts of Manly Braveness. In all the frenetic action that follows after Aurora learns what Jim has done to her, Passengers simply drops the thread.
Now, I suppose I could go on and write another couple of hundred words about how terrible this all is, and how Passengers could have done vastly more with its premise by turning it into any number of horror-movie scenarios. But that’s been done, and besides, it’s not the only way to interpret the movie.
You could read Passengers as a mildly Trumpist story about how Aurora, a white, cosmopolitan journalist who dips into memoir-writing, puts aside her outrage at the harm that’s been done to her, which is bad but not exactly a war crime, and learns to appreciate a working-class white man.
Alternatively, you could look at all the energy that’s been spent on the wrong done to Aurora and suggest that the feminist readings of the movie ignore the economic implications of the movie’s premise: In Passengers, the ship is sharply stratified by class, and colonists such as Jim have to agree to pay 20 percent of their future lifetime earnings to the corporation.