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By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
When Passengers came out in 2016, it caused a relatively minor blip on the pop culture radar. The movie starred two different Marvel icons, Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence, so there was plenty of hype before the movie premiered. While it made okay money at the box office, it was a critical bomb (a freaking 30 percent on Rotten Tomatoes!) that almost everybody hated. That’s because it was a sci-fi movie without any real action, adventure, or exploration. Of course, the studio couldn’t market Passengers for what it really is: a horror movie where Chris Pratt’s penis is the monster trying to kill you.
Well, not youpersonally, but Jennifer Lawrence. You see, this is a film where Pratt’s character wakes up 90 years early on a sleeper ship. As his loneliness mounts, he eventually awakens Lawrence’s character early. He’s just hoping for companionship, but he doesn’t seem to realize the moral ickiness of dooming someone else to crippling, soul-crushing isolation. Because of this, Passengers (now streaming on Netflix) makes for a pretty terrible sci-fi movie. However, it’s weirdly perfect to show other people for exactly one reason: how they react to Pratt’s decision to wake up Lawrence early reveals whether or not you can actually trust your friends and family!
Creepers Gonna Creep
The idea of using Passengers as a Rorschach test for friends is important to me because I did it completely by accident. Years ago, I was discussing this film with a younger friend who had previously made the bold choice to move in with an older woman and become a father figure to her three children (I promise, this factoid will be important later). My buddy claimed that the decision made by Pratt’s character was understandable; after all, the character was so lonely and depressed that he contemplated suicide. However, I maintained that waking Lawrence’s character up early was both manipulative and cruel, effectively dooming someone else to a life of depression and isolation.
Our debate over Passengers effectively became a debate over empathy. My friend empathized with Pratt’s character and imagined how he would feel about going the rest of his life without human interaction. To my buddy, waking up a woman for companionship was an understandable act of desperation. Meanwhile, I empathized with Lawrence’s character, arguing that I’d hate to be the one forced into a life of isolation because someone couldn’t keep it in their pants. Months after our debate, my friend got a new job far away, and his girlfriend drove him hundreds of miles, where they actively planned to buy a house together. A happy ending, right?
A Movie That Rewards Bad Choices
Nah. He fell for a girl at his new gig less than a week after moving and dumped the woman (the one with three kids who saw him as a father figure) he had been dating for years. When it happened, my first thought was our argument over Passengers. As it turns out, he really was like Pratt’s character at the end of the day: someone who would screw over anyone if he simply got lonely and horny enough.
Now, the internet is filled with countless different ideas for testing those in your life with weird scenarios. This includes everything from nonsensical stuff (“would you still love me if I was a worm?”) to weirdly controversial stuff (“do you choose the bear or the man?”). However, most of these hypotheticals are a very stupid way of learning anything useful about my friends and family. But the scenario in Passengers is so meaty and compelling that it’s like an ethics word problem brought to life. For Pratt’s character, the question is whether he’s justified in waking up Jennifer Lawrence’s character because he is on the verge of suicide.
An Argument That Makes You Wanna Scream
To me, Pratt is not justified. Sure, I felt bad for the guy, but he’s making a deliberate choice to inflict his own misery on someone else. That’d be bad enough if he had just woken up another man so he’d have someone to bro out with, making himself the only human contact the other guy would ever have. However, he deliberately wakes up somebody that he found attractive in hopes of them having sex. It’s textbook manipulation and, spoilers, they do end up hooking up. The movie presents this as a happy ending, but this is the It’s Always Sunny “because of the implication” thing played out to its darkest extreme.
Anyway, my buddy who so passionately defended Pratt’s character? Soon afterward, he ended up making his own selfish decision in the name of getting some strange, destroying an existing relationship he had spent the better part of a decade developing. Basically, Passengers revealed something dark about this dude’s personality, and it didn’t take him long to prove his character. Want to figure out which of your own friends and family you can actually trust? Then grab the remote and brace yourself because Passengers is currently streaming on Netflix.
