YMMV / Passengers (2016)

• Audience-Alienating Premise: There are a number of ways to tell a story like this. One could do an accident or unwitting psychological experiment perpetrated on both characters (including Black Comedy), or the popular idea of a thriller from Aurora's point-of-view. The one the filmmakers chose was building the film around the POV character committing a premeditated, sexually-motivated Moral Event Horizon act. Even good chemistry and performances from the big-name leads, a high eight-figures marketing budget and an ideal holiday release date couldn't bring in close to what the studio wanted in domestic box office. Most marketing indicating it was the first option, an accident for both characters, didn't help. See They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot below, as many people consider the plot fixable with minor rewrites.
• Awesome Music:
  • The plot and its backlash aside, the score by Thomas Newman is nothing short of amazing. From the similarly lonely vibes given in "The Starship Avalon (Main Title)" to the intensity of "Zero-Gravity", it's just a wonderful score that deserves its Oscar nomination. Oh, and special mention goes to the outright beautiful "Starlit".
  • Imagine Dragons' "Levitate," probably one of the most heartwarming, uplifting, and idealistic love songs you will ever hear in modern times.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: A rather big amount of press for the movie came about for Chris Pratt showing his ass during a shower scene.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Some watchers sympathize entirely with Jim because they believe his decision to wake Aurora up and essentially doom her to sharing the same fate as him was something they, or anyone, would do if they were in his shoes.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Even the people who hated the film praised Arthur the robot bartender.
• Genius Bonus: More of a 'perceptive bonus' but the main poster for Passengers, shown at the top of the main page, has the Morse code sequence for SOS below the title.
• It Was His Sled: Jim wakes Aurora up.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence in a movie together. A point that sparked an intense debate online, as some cited the two stars as the film's one big drawing point and others who claimed the film's poor box-office performance proved that neither of them was a guaranteed box-office draw. It's likely that the truth, as it most often does, lies somewhere in-between.
• Memetic Mutation: The scene where Aurora and Jim are sitting in the cafeteria looking longingly at each other, before Aurora climbs up the table and kisses Jim passionately gained some popularity as a meme format - depicting Jim saying something that Aurora wholeheartedly agrees with to the point that she shows her appreciation by kissing him passionately.
• Narm: Aurora's incredibly on the nose Meaningful Name - a woman who gets awoken from her sleep by a stranger. Especially when it's alongside a name as mundane as Jim.
• Older Than They Think:
  • Who'd have thought the plot of The Fairly OddParents! episode "Just the Two of Us" (guy arranges it so that the girl he likes will be trapped with him in a world where they're the only two people around, only for her to eventually snap and turn on him) would get made into a feature film years later?
  • The 1991 middle-grade book Sleepers, Wake by Paul Samuel Jacobs has the same basic concept of a single passenger being accidentally woken early on a lifetime-long spaceflight, though in this case the passenger was ten years old, was never able to wake anyone else, and the book begins just before the ship arrives at its destination with the boy having lived on the ship with only the AI for company for fifty years.
  • The Frederik Pohl short story The Fiend also has the sole awake occupant (the Captain) of a colony ship waking up a beautiful (and completely nude) female passenger out of loneliness. However, the passenger understandably spends the whole time screaming at the Captain that he is a pervert and will be criminally charged for this. The Captain puts her back to sleep and sure enough, he’s arrested after the journey's end and sentenced to having his brain used as the piloting system for a different starship, making him even more lonely.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: Jim waking up Aurora and the consequent falling in love had people more upset than anything else in the film. Hell, most of the tropes on this page and in the main page paint this plot point in various negative lights, such as Stockholm Syndrome. Critics were so disgusted by this turn of events that they deliberately spoiled the film's plot in their reviews and asked readers not to see the film, which worked.
• Questionable Casting:
  • Andy García was barely featured and given essentially a glorified cameo.
  • For some, Chris Pratt, best known as Deadpan Snarker Man Children, was not the right choice for the role of Jim, especially since none of his strengths are played to at all in the movie.
  • Some even thought this was also a case for Jennifer Lawrence, who's best known for playing characters with deep emotional life, doesn't seem to fit playing a lonely and career-driven romantic lead Aurora.

• Ron the Death Eater: Quite a few reviewers have interpreted Jim waking up Aurora as a Moral Event Horizon and actively wish for his death. While the film doesn't present his actions as right, it doesn't pretend he's an egomaniac rapist either. Gus pretty much spells this out for the audience when he likens Jim's predicament to a drowning man.
• So Okay, It's Average: All the controversy around the plot implications and casting based solely on star power aside, this was the textbook case of an average film. Neither the plot, visuals, or performances are bad by themselves. Neither the plot, visuals, or performances are stellar. It's just an hour and a half of moderately entertaining film with nothing special about it. For a movie entirely relying on a character interactions, it lacks serious chemistry between actors, but is still performed well-enough.
• Tear Jerker: Most of the first two acts of the film are laden with these, particularly after one considers how lonely Jim would be for the first year, how full of self-loathing anyone who made his decision would have been, and how betrayed Aurora would feel after finding out what he had done.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: The entire appearance of Andy Garcia. Many reviews wondered why the hell such a well-known actor would be hired for such scant screen time with zero lines, and said it was an absolute certainty that his role was originally bigger but was cut down to the point where it might as well be removed entirely, but wasn't.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Once Jim's decision to wake Aurora comes to light, the film has several interesting directions it can go in but ultimately reduces this action to a very dark Third-Act Misunderstanding when Aurora chooses to take him back. Some reviews pointed out that the story would have worked very well as a thriller or a horror movie with Jim as a villain driven mad by isolation, snapping after the only other person on board shuns him. Alternately, some felt that a better direction for Jim would be to actually die fixing the ship, thus allowing Aurora to forgive him and causing Jim to be effectively punished for what he did, so she would not pursue a relationship with him. This also could have set up a situation where Aurora has to decide whether she can live the rest of her life alone, and possibly makes the same choice as him to wake someone up.
  • Arthur seems to have a hidden agenda, but that quickly turns out not to be the case.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Jim is nominally the hero of our story, but due to his deliberately waking Aurora for purely selfish reasons, one might have a hard time sympathizing with him. To make it worse, numerous viewers pointed out that even the film as released, with just minor editing of the order of scenes (the second act becomes the first, while the first becomes the second), could still make him a sympathetic character, despite his actions.
• The Woobie: Aurora. Woken up before her time because a stalker thought she was attractive, effectively dooming her into spending the rest of her life with him. He spends the beginning of their relationship lying to and manipulating her into thinking that her waking up was an unfortunate coincidence, and when she finds out and is justifiably angry about it, she has no way of truly avoiding him or what he could possibly do to her since they're the only ones awake on the ship with nowhere else to go. Her friend later (unintentionally) gaslights her into accepting the situation via a recording, and rather than take her chance to get her life and future back by returning to cryosleep, she chooses to remain with the guy that put her in this situation in the first place for the rest of her natural life out of guilt and likely Stockholm Syndrome.
• Why Would Anyone Take Him Back?: The question constantly asked by reviewers when Aurora hooks up with Jim even after she knows that he basically stranded her, took away any chance of her making it to the colony, and pretty much ruined her life. Especially when she's given the option to go back to sleep.

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