Why Passengers' Ending Was So Controversial

July 07, 2024

Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence teamed up in the sci-fi film Passengers, but the movie was widely criticized for its big twist and ending.

Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence teamed up in the sci-fi film Passengers, but the movie was widely criticized for its big twist and ending. The film started out as an original script written by Jon Spaihts in 2007, prior to him working on movies like Prometheus and Doctor Strange. Keanu Reeves, who was originally attached to star, actually hired Spaihts to write Passengers after the pair nearly worked together on a since-abandoned sci-fi project titled Shadow 19. From there, its budget swelled from $35 million to as much as $150 million as it evolved and found itself stuck in early development. It eventually hit theaters in 2016, with Lawrence playing the female lead and Pratt replacing Reeves.

Directed by Morten Tyldum (The Imitation Game), Passengers revolves around mechanical engineer Jim Preston (Pratt) and journalist Aurora Lane (Lawrence), two passengers aboard a spaceship traveling to a distant planet who're awakened from their hibernation pods 90 years too early. The twist, which the film's trailers didn't reveal, is that Jim actually awakens Aurora after his own pod malfunctions and he's unable to bear the idea of living out the rest of his life in isolation, save for the ship's android barman Arthur (Michael Sheen). From there, the pair gradually begin to grow close and fall in love with each other - at least, until Arthur reveals the truth to Aurora.

Although she's naturally angry with Jim, Aurora puts those feelings aside when the two learn the ship is suffering from multiple system failures as a result of an asteroid collision (the same one that led to Jim's pod malfunctioning in the first place) and they have to repair the vessel before it's too late. Jim is nearly killed in the process, but Aurora manages to rescue him and the two then discover there's a way to put Aurora back into hibernation for the remainder of the journey. However, rather than bidding farewell to Jim forever, Aurora chooses to stay with him and the pair live out the remainder of their lives on the ship together.

Reviews were generally unkind to Passengers, with critics describing the ending as a highly problematic wish fulfillment fantasy at best (one where a woman stays in love with a man, despite learning their relationship was based on a terrible, self-serving lie) and, at worst, one that morphs the film into an unintentional horror movie. The issue for most critics was not, per se, the choice to have Jim wake Aurora when his isolation becomes too much to bear; it was Passengers' failure to examine the moral implications of his action and the questions it raises about consent. People have similarly taken the movie to task for not fully developing Aurora as a character and diving deeper into her complicated feelings towards Jim after she learns the truth. Instead, Passengers basically morphs into a disaster thriller in its third act and pushes its relationship storyline to the back-burner (along with its earlier themes about class differences), before resolving it in an unsatisfying and, when one really thinks about it, frankly creepy manner.

Producer Neal Moritz later dismissed these criticisms of Passengers' ending, claiming "One guy said [we were justifying date rape] and a lot of media picked up on that and it became the mantra that the film carried." Lawrence, on the other hand, has since indicated she feels those critiques were valid, explaining "I’m not embarrassed by [Passengers] by any means. There was just stuff that I wished I’d looked into deeper before jumping on.” In spite of the critical response, the film still managed to gross a little over $300 million at the box office, so (in theory) it more or less made back its production costs. At the same time, the consensus on Passengers hasn't improved over the years and the movie is now regarded as little more than a project that had some good ingredients, but came out of the oven a confused and poor-tasting mess.

NEXT: Passengers: Differences Between Original Script's Ending & Final Film

Recommended Articles