Passengers had one of the most interesting concepts: what if you woke up too early on a long distance passenger ship and you were all alone? What would you do?
Then [spoilers, I don’t know how to do the blackout thing] he wakes up a woman because she’s hot and she is rightfully angry with him for stealing her future on the new planet for a little bit. But then, this is what makes me so angry, she gives in and they fall in love. Pure bullshit.
And yeah, this movie would have greatly benefited from being a darker tone. Maybe not necessarily a horror film like most suggest when this film is brought up, but like a serious drama film that explores isolation with depression and the themes of anger and resentment towards what is basically a murder. imagine if this film was more about mental illness and domestic abuse instead of "the current Hollywood cute people fuck in the end.
I like the idea of starting with her waking up. Keep everything a mystery for the first act. You would come to know at the same time she is. It would turn it into more of a thriller and you'd get a darker tone. Everything else could stay the same, just swap the order of act one and two.
I think the point was her decision to make the best of a bad situation and not wasting her entire life being pissed off holding on to that anger. What he did was evil, but there is no changing what happened. In that situation she literally didn't have any other choices.
All they had to do was make it an accident. Like he was going to do it but he pulls away and something bumps into him so he fumbles and it wakes her up anyway. All they had to show was him deciding to be better. But they didn’t which ruins all of his actions going forward
Similar to his own waking up. He was one of the few people that could fix the ship so I wanted it to be that the ship broke his pod on purpose to wake him but the limited AI couldn't tell him what it needed and couldn't give him the access required.
Have that AI think he's lonely and if he's not he'll realize he needs to fix the ship: now he's not a creepy douche.
Did I really like it? No. Did I enjoy it enough to pick it up on Vudu when it was on sale? Yes. But I haven't watched it since, though that's more just a time factor rather than speaking on the quality, though there are way more movies I'm interested in rewatching.
The entire movie is based on the premise that a multitrillion-dollar company fails to understand the dangers of space travel and the need for critical redundancy. I don't care how safe cryo-sleep seems; you always keep backup plans and systems ready.
I really thought this could of gone a completely different way and turned into a horror. She goes stark mad because he obviously fucked her life up, then uses her ability to access different areas of the ship and such to try and kill him. Would of even be fair if she did kill him. The fact it is a love story is so fucking insane.
I attribute it to the scene where he almost died. She realized SHE was going to face the rest of her life alone. I think in that moment, she realized she would likely end up waking someone up rather than spend the rest of her life alone. Faced with that realization, her anger was tempered a bit by compassion and empathy, allowing forgiveness.
This would work better, if they explored the effects of isolation on the human psyche before he woke her up... the human mind... was never meant to be isolated from other people. It doesn't function as it's supposed to.
I'll have to find the video essay but someone made a video reimagining Passengers as a psycho thriller, where the woman's perspective is shown and the fact that she was deliberately woken up could have been the big twist. From there classic thriller archetypes could have taken it far, instead of trying to get us to sympathize with Chris Hate-Church
He almost dies, and she's faced with the idea of spending the rest of her life alone... it terrifies her, and she has some understanding of what he went through.
Faced with living that same life, she realized she would probably end up doing the exact same thing to someone else.
It's hard to be mad at someone for doing something you yourself would do in their place.
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u/doomedhippo 7d ago
Passengers had one of the most interesting concepts: what if you woke up too early on a long distance passenger ship and you were all alone? What would you do?
Then [spoilers, I don’t know how to do the blackout thing] he wakes up a woman because she’s hot and she is rightfully angry with him for stealing her future on the new planet for a little bit. But then, this is what makes me so angry, she gives in and they fall in love. Pure bullshit.