My boyfriend and I have been looking for creative quarantine date nights and have stumbled on a good one thanks to Tik Tok: we go to the Walmart down the street from our apartment complex and without looking each choose a movie from the $5 bin. Out of these two random selections, we pick out our movie for the evening. The only rule is that neither of us can have seen the movie before. So far, we have watched Office Christmas Party (a movie set in Chicago with seemingly no understanding of Chicago geography), Gremlins, and most recently, Passengers.
Now, I know that Passengers came out in 2016—four whole years ago—and that’s a long time for a hot-take article such as this. But if John Mulaney can do a bit in a standup special about Home Alone 2: Lost in New York seventeen years after the fact, I feel entitled to share with the world my thoughts on this chrome-encrusted piece of cinema. Warning: Lots and lots of spoilers to follow.
Passengers takes place on the starship Avalon during a mission transporting over 5,000 cryogenically frozen people to a colony planet 120 years away from Earth. Thirty years into the journey, the Avalon hits a massive meteor and things start to malfunction including a hibernation pod holding mechanic Jim Preston (Chris Pratt). Jim wakes up and realizes he has another ninety years of space flight to go. Unable to contact anyone on Earth for fifty years, Jim spends a whole year alone before waking up another passenger, writer Aurora Lane (Jennifer Lawrence), who he has obsessed over for months. Romance blossoms between the two until Aurora learns that Jim intentionally woke her up, sentencing her to a life on the starship. Another year in and a member of the crew miraculously wakes and explains that the ship has been slowly failing ever since they hit the meteor. Aurora and Jim put aside their differences to save the ship and live out the rest of their lives together. The crew of the Avalon wakes ninety years later to a completely altered ship and written explanation left by Aurora.
For the sake of brevity, here’s my argument: Passengers is a half-baked remake (or *rip-off*) and its slogan should be “Titanic in Space!” Now, let me present my evidence.
1. Passengers starts with the Avalon blindly flying through an impossibly dense meteor-field. The shields deflect small chunks of rock but we see the Avalon go crashing into a very, very large meteor. That’s when the problems on the ship arise. Logically, you would think that there would be a failsafe program that would wake up at least one member of the crew in a crisis, but there’s nothing like that here. The Homestead Company, like Titanic’s White Star Line, has an inflated sense of security and confidence in their ships and equipment.
The artificial intelligence aboard the Avalon reiterates over and over to Jim and Aurora that the hibernation pods never malfunction, their presence at this moment is an impossibility never even considered. When discovering the damage in the hull, Aurora says the ship is “supposed to be meteor-proof,” all of which echoes the repetitive insistence in Titanic that “this ship can’t sink.” In case you’re not getting the allusion, Aurora makes the connection even more obvious saying to Jim and Gus, “We’re on a sinking ship!” Both ships have massive precaution blindspots because of undue confidence and hubris on the part of the makers and prove to be susceptible to holes from meteors and icebergs respectively.
2. Just as Jack and Rose meet during a near-suicide attempt on the bow of the Titanic, Jim “meets” still-sleeping Aurora immediately after his own possible suicide attempt. While Rose comes close to throwing herself off the ship into the icy Atlantic, Jim almost opens the airtight doors out into space without wearing a spacesuit. Jack talks Rose off the ledge and while Aurora is still comatose she has the same life-saving, life-changing effect on Jim, who suddenly centers his whole existence on her.
3. There is a clear class difference between our main characters Aurora and Jack--I mean Jim. For the entirety of his first year awake on the ship, Jim is unable to access any breakfast items except a brick-like loaf and plain black coffee. There are ample breakfast options, but Jim does not have the coveted Elite status to access the French Mochaccino or Pumpkin Spice Latte. The Avalon has other dining options (like the French, Mexican, and sushi restaurants) where we see Jim eat his fill, so I’m not sure why he doesn’t just eat at those places all the time. Regardless, as soon as Aurora wakes, we learn she is Elite status and Jim gets a major breakfast upgrade.
The class status doesn’t really seem to impact the story at all beyond breakfasts because Jim has been able to hack the ship’s system or break in places to get other resources and comfort upgrades. We do learn that Aurora is not planning on staying on the colony planet Homestead II and bought a round-trip ticket back to Earth, so in this way, her money extends her life beyond the colony planet and an additional 250 years because of the cryogenically frozen travel. The extension doesn’t make much of an impact in terms of adding consequences to Jim’s actions though because a life stolen is a life stolen, regardless of whether she made one space voyage or two.
The class difference does harken back to James Cameron’s classic characters Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet), seeming to make a possible shorthand for us to understand the emotional depth Aurora and Jim aspire to have without actually putting in the work of creating emotionally deep characters.
4. Gus Mancuso (Lawrence Fishbourne), the third passenger to wake up, is a crew member. He doesn’t have a lot of screen time, but he does parallel Titanic’s Mr. Thomas Andrews (Victor Garber), the Titanic’s naval architect. Both come in to play during the ship’s crisis explaining the gravity of the situation to the protagonists. Mr. Andrews initially tells Rose about the lack of adequate lifeboats on Titanic and then comes across Jack and Rose as the ship begins to finally sink, giving Rose his lifejacket which she wears until rescued from the Atlantic. Likewise, Gus discovers the multiple failures on Starship Avalon and gives his wristband and access code to Jim and Aurora, which is its own kind of lifejacket allowing them to access restricted parts of the ship and override the medical bay bringing Jim back to life. Both men perish on their respective voyages and their bodies are lost in sea or space.
5. Titanic’s infamous floating door scene even gets a nod when Jim cuts off a door from the spaceship to act as a heat shield from the nuclear radiation he is about to vent in order to save the spaceship and all its passengers. This doesn’t seem practical or effective, but there it is.
6. In both movies, the female lead is turned against the male lead but then returns to them before the end of the movie. In Titanic, Rose is tricked into believing that Jack stole her massive diamond necklace, but then leaves her mother and fiancé behind to go and save him, telling him she knows he wouldn’t have stolen from her. In Passengers, Aurora shuns Jim after learning he woke her intentionally. She ignores him for a long time, beats him once, and tells Gus what Jim did equates to murder. She then has a massive, inexplicable change of heart when Jim goes outside to manually vent the radiation, telling him that she can’t live on the ship without him. What should be a very grim line is painted as romantic forgiveness. The plot points match up even though Jack is deserving of Rose’s return and Jim is not—at the very least not without more reckoning for his actions.
7. At Passengers’ climax, Aurora tells Jim, “You die, I die,” which is entirely a direct paraphrase of Jack’s iconic line, “You jump, I jump” in Titanic. Maybe Aurora is in fact a Titanic fanatic, but the movie provides nothing to support that leap. Ultimately, I think this line is a little too close for comfort and really blurs the distinction between a healthy nod to another creative work and outright theft.
Arguably with a movie that so closely mirrors another, every plot point seems to reference something, so there are probably some parallels I missed. For example, I’m sure you could tie in Aurora’s leaving the ship to rescue Jim to Rose’s jumping back on the Titanic to be with Jack. And you could definitely argue that Aurora’s final voice-over is pretty similar to Old Rose’s voice over, even to the point that both are narrating 80-some years into the future from the film’s main events! But I digress...
My final thought is that the one merit of this movie is it’s at least visually pleasing, even with all that chrome. The plot is messy and does not adequately deal with the moral question posed by Jim’s actions, instead excusing his selfishness through Aurora’s forgiveness and choice to live out her life on the ship with Jim. Also, I wish they would have named Jennifer Lawrence’s character something other than "Aurora," which means “dawn.” (Do. You. Get. It?). "Aurora" is also oh-so-coincidentally the name of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. (Ha. Ha.). A better choice might have been "Patty" as a reference to Patty Hearst, the woman almost synonymous with Stockholm Syndrome. But that’s just my suggestion!
Sleep tight until next time, star-travelers! ;)
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