The movie Passengers with Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt is worth watching for sure: it's got drama, it's got humor, it's got a tragic love story. But with one simple change, it could've been an absolutely terrifying horror movie.
The space-odyssey that is Passengers with Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt starring as Aurora and Jim surely is a must-watch for fans of sci-fi movies. The premise: Earth is doomed and in an effort to save humanity, a spaceship sets out to populate a new planet.
On board of the Avalon: 5,000 colonists and 258 crew members, asleep in a hibernation pod for the 120-year journey to the planet Homestead II where humanity will try to live on. Tragedy strikes Jim as his hibernation pod malfunctions and he wakes up way before he is supposed to.
Doomed to a life alone on the Avalon as the only one who's awake, Jim falls into a deep depression – understandably so. It does get lonely with only the robot bartender Arthur (Michael Sheen) to keep you company.
That's where the horror starts. Or, rather, should have started.
Obligatory spoiler warning: the movie is from 2017, you've had plenty of time to watch it, come on!
With This Simple Change, Passengers Becomes A Horror Movie
Jim decides he's had enough of his lonely days and does the unthinkable: he wakes up another passenger, the author Aurora (who's name alone makes her the right choice to go on a journey through space, but I digress).
He tells her that her hibernation pod seems to have malfunctioned as well – a lie. After some mourning from Aurora's side, she accepts her fate, spends her life on the Avalon with Jim and the pair falls in love.
Good for them, sure, but that's where the whole story could have taken its terrifying turn. And it would have been so simple: just shift the perspective. Show us the story through Aurora's eyes and you've got a picture-perfect horror movie.
At this point, audiences spent the better part of the movie getting to know Jim and truly, he's not a bad guy from the get-go. He's desperate, we as the viewers get that and sympathize with him – kind of hard to hate him, honestly.
But starting the movie with Aurora waking up? Fall in love with Jim alongside her, just to get gut-punched by the horrifying truth that he woke her up just to not be alone anymore? Dooming her to die with him without getting a say in it?
That makes him the villain. 0/10, would not date again. Being trapped on a spaceship for the next 90 years with no means of escape? Chef's kiss, good trope, sign me up.
Passengers wouldn't even necessarily need to change the story: give Jim his heroic moment and have Aurora forgive him, the two grow old together despite Jim's mistake. He's not an irredeemable character, even if it's messed up what he did to Aurora. Roll credits. Or give us some "chasing each other around the Avalon with lethal weapons" scenes and let Aurora make the ship her own – fine with me, too.
Seems like a missed opportunity to me, even though I still love the movie as it is.