Review

A guilty pleasure of mine. Passengers is not a good movie and I know that. But I find it strangely compelling, having seen it probably 4 or so times. It feels close-ish to a Twilight Zone episode. And it also does something that I'm personally rather fond of. Small cast and a focus on drama. It's not dissimilar to older stageplay-style movies in that way. And yet it has so many problems that stop it from being a good movie, even though I still to this day enjoy watching it.

Much energy has been spent online talking about how to "fix" Passengers. I've heard most of them. And I think they're all fairly flawed in one way or another. I don't think this is a movie that can easily be fixed. Anything that does "fix" it amounts to a rewrite. And at that point you have a different movie. In some ways, I wonder if that's a draw of the movie to me. That it can be close to something that I really like but also have so many fatal flaws and also having no easy way to fix it that doesn't transform it into something entirely different. It's sort of a jenga tower. Let's go through some of the suggested fixes.

There's the idea that the story should be from Aurora's perspective. Allowing the reveal of Jim's betrayal to be more of a dramatic stinger. The first problem we contend with is what is the genre of this movie? It is clearly a romance. (even taking into account the "profound violence" our main character Jim commits against Aurora.) ^[1] If we want to switch to Aurora's perspective, in order to make the treachery committed against her even stronger than it already is, I don't really think this movies can stay a romance. One of the biggest negatives people have against this movie is simply the whole conceit: this guy wakes this woman up, condemning her to a premature death, because he is lonely. And because he is willing to sacrifice himself in the end to save her and everyone's lives, she comes around on him and forgives him. Whether you're willing to go with the movie on this or not, this is what the movie is going for. It does at the end of the day present this romance as it is. A fucked up beginning, but real in the end. If we want to switch to Aurora and really play up Jim's deceit, I don't think we can keep this a romance and still have it be (relatively) believable. This is Jim and Aurora, not George and Martha.

An addendum, something I've seen often seen suggested as a better ending to the film, is having Jim die while fixing the reactor. And afterward giving Aurora the same choice that he was given, whether to wake someone else up or die alone. A bleak ending, my problem with this is that it doe not feel tonally consistent with the rest of the film. This feels like the end of a Twilight Zone episode, not Passengers. Again, if we're making a totally different thriller-esque film, that's one thing. But I don't think we can keep the movie primarily as a romance and end on a downer. I'm open to occasional bleakness, really. But I don't think the rest of the world would be kind to such an ending. It feels very "I'm Reddit and this is deep" to me.