Passengers could have been a great psychological thriller, and it almost was!
The film’s quality is a roller coaster of ups and downs before plunging face first throughout its last third. The first 25 minutes of Passengers is an engaging sci-fi drama: solid pacing, effective sense of conveyed isolation from its protagonist (great for a space film), and genuine, emotional drama. The film then decides to shoot itself in the foot by switching focus to its “main attraction”: a generic romance between two of Hollywood’s current “hottest” stars (Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence). For the next 35 minutes, Passengers throws away all previously built strengths in favor of uninteresting romantic quirkiness, bland sex scenes, and a whole ton of flirting, flirting, flirting!
Things look bad for Passengers, until suddenly the film seems to pull a complete 180 into fridge brilliance: becoming a Hitchcockian psychological thrill ride…for about five minutes…and yet those five minutes are so good! It twists the bland 35 minutes of generic romance into something delightfully disturbing: taking its protagonist’s established loneliness and somewhat antisocial tendencies—which gave him a sympathetic quality in the opening sections—and turning it sinister by having him obsessively pursue his understandably distraught “soul mate”, who finds out the man she loves has been lying and manipulating her this whole time. The best part to these five minutes is how the protagonist’s passive, gentle nature doesn’t change at all while mentally tormenting her—making his once likable quality now deliciously unsettling.
Had Passengers kept up such an exhilarating turn of events for its remaining runtime, the film would have worked, and it would have worked well. Yet Passengers can’t help but shoot itself in the other foot (or possibly the brain, seeing how moronic it gets): taking the clearly messed up relationship between its main characters and actually have them get lovingly back together—spending the last 40 minutes as an entirely trite, forgettable sci-fi adventure. There are many reasonable arguments to be made regarding why Passengers is a bad film—for me, it’s because the film had potential to be something exceptional, and was so close to being such, yet chose to waste such potential on sci-fi mediocrity and a horribly written romance.
