You all sound like individual little barrels of laughs.
Article on io9: http://io9.gizmodo.com/how-the-casting-of-jennifer-lawrence-transformed-passen-1790280612
It states that the screenwriter’s initial script focused on Platt’s character’s isolation for much of the movie. But that adding a star like JLaw changed that:
[QUOTE=io9 article]
These are the questions Chris Pratt’s character, Jim Preston, has to deal with at the start of Passengers, as he’s one of 5,000 people who paid a company called Homestead to fly to a planet, Homestead Two, to start a new life. The trip takes 120 years but he mistakenly wakes up 90 years too early and is not able to go back to sleep. He’s isolated, just as Spaihts originally conceived.
And yet, that’s not what the movie ends up really being about, and that’s in large part because of Lawrence.
“We might have done things differently if our stars were less famous,” the writer said. “Meaning that, if we were just making this as an independent film, in a vacuum, I think the time spent with him, alone, would be deeply satisfying. And you could really let it play for awhile. But because the most famous woman in the world is in the movie and on the poster, there is an additional pressure to get to her in a timely manner.”
[/QUOTE]
Yeah, if anything I’m more interested now that I know it’s not an outerspace meet-cute with some heroics at the end. Which isn’t to say that I wouldn’t regret watching it depending on how it all came together.
Just FYI, this movie passed Howard Tayler’s Threshold of Awesome, and he’s generally trustworthy (we occasionally differ but for understandable reasons - really didn’t agree with him about Big Hero 6, for instance) so I might check it out just on his say-so.
The NYTimes gave it a meh.
They discuss the plot openly (SPOILER!)
The movie is presented as a meet-cute romance (here we are, the only two awake!), with a classic crisis event in the middle (she finds out he woke her up to address his need for company), and a climax ending where he gets to redeem himself.
The Times uses the word creepy to describe his waking her up, but doesn’t focus on it.
Screenwriter and director offer detailed thinking on the actions of Pratt’s character here: The Writer and Director of Passengers Address the Film's Controversial Plot Point
I took one for the team and saw this last night, and I’d agree with Wordman’s link above that it’s clear the writers didn’t gloss over the issue. It’s addressed, head on, at multiple points in the film; it’s a major factor in the relationship, and I think these early reviews are a bit unfair by singling out this plot element.
Rest of my thoughts in spoiler boxes just to be safe.
[spoiler]It is fair to point out that the trailers seemed to be for a different movie, but in their defense, the actual problem with the movie is that it’s all over the place tonally. There are goofy romantic comedy scenes, there are multiple musical montages, one of which basically recreates “Kevin from Home Alone discovers that he can do whatever he wants.” It’s played for laughs. There’s melodramatic action. And underlying it all is a dark, dark movie about people who are well and truly doomed.
They could have cut 3 different trailers and sold it as either a romantic comedy, a dark indie sci-fi flick, or a mindless action blockbuster. And even at 2 hours long, there just wasn’t enough time to have all 3 of those movies in one.
Overall I give it a solid thumbs down. Often with low budget sci-fi movies I’m willing to give them a pass if the set pieces are nice and the premise is interesting, but I didn’t find Passengers to be particularly interesting to look at and the interesting premise was muddled by all of the hollywood elements. I can easily see this as having been a good movie if not for getting picked up by Columbia/Sony and had big stars thrown at it with all of the script meddling that goes along with that.[/spoiler]
Interesting to read, and I think the director is right to a certain extent. I think that most people would spend a good amount of time alternating between enjoying the amenities on the ship, trying to send out a message, and trying to fix the sleep pod so they could go back to sleep. But eventually most people would start going insane from the isolation. It’s like solitary confinement, and while I would rather be on a luxury spaceship instead of a small prison cell, at least the prisoner in solitary confinement probably has an hour of being around others per day and occasional communication with family and maybe even hope of being released. While it sounds like Pratt’s character has zero hope of interacting with another human unless another accident happens or he wakes someone up.
I think most people in Pratt’s character situation would eventually be torn between the impulse to wake someone else up and the impulse to commit suicide. I don’t know what I or what most people would choose, but I’m guessing fairly few people would just die of old age after being alone on the spaceship for 60 years. It doesn’t excuse the choice, but it’s understandable and an interesting premise for a movie, even if it sounds like this movie botched it.
I read some comments on i09 and other places where people were judging his choice and saying how they like being alone and would be happy with the entertainments on board, but there’s a big difference between choosing to mostly keep to yourself and being completely trapped in isolation from human interaction. Humans are social animals, and I think even the biggest introvert would eventually start going crazy without any human interaction, just they would more likely be driven to suicide than to wake someone else up.
I also haven’t seen the movie, but my impression from reviews is that the movie sympathizes with his situation much more than hers. I can sympathize with his situation and that he was driven to do something terrible out of craziness and desperation, but I would also hope that the movie also sympathizes with her and the horror that she’s feeling and how she’s justified in hating him and holding him in contempt and have her mourn the life that she’s lost. If the movie does show that, and it’s shown as a big deal that she forgives him then that’s one thing, but if it’s treated as less of a big deal and more like she needs to forgive him because isn’t he so loveable and heroic, then that’s much different. I haven’t seen the movie so I don’t know how it’s treated, but from the reviews it sounds like it’s not handled well. I’ll probably wait until Netflix or Redbox to see it to find out for myself.
It sounds like any of the three potential movies could have been good. Too bad it was Hollywoodized and didn’t work out well.
As William Goldman said in Adventures in the Screen Trade, ''In the world of the screenplay not only are you terribly limited as to what subject matter is viable; your treatment of the subject matter is infinitely more restricted by the power of the star."
I went and saw this movie tonight and rather enjoyed it. I came here looking to see what other technical missteps others had noticed. I’ll look more later to see if there’s another thread for those after this post.
The review linked in the OP is misleading in at least one key point which I suspect is a deliberate attempt to drive viewers away from the movie.
Spoilering the review and my observation just in case…
From the review.
Driven half-mad by the prospect of living out his life alone, he peruses the ship’s passengers, and becomes fixated upon a sleeping woman named Aurora, played in the film by Jennifer Lawrence."
What I actually saw.
There was no ‘perusing’ the other passengers like they were livestock or merchandise on display for purchase. He quite literally fell down beside her pod and saw her as he was getting up. His ‘stalking’ amounted to reading everything there was in the public record about her. He had absolutely no access to any private information due to the fact that he was practically a cargo class passenger. Compare to Googling your favorite author.
Would you or I succumb to the temptation to wake someone else up after spending a year without human contact? Two years? Five? I wouldn’t bet against it.
The rapey accusation is based on him letting her willingly sleep with him without her having knowledge that he deliberately woke her up. Right or wrong, how many millions of people have had romantic or sexual relationships with someone else based at least partially on some level of deception, whether it’s about financial stability, professional status, marital status, or that you saw them somewhere and then arranged to accidentally bump into them to start a conversation rather than just introducing yourself and saying that you thought they were attractive for whatever reason.
The review strikes me as coming from someone after they came home from a march waving a “Down With the Patriarchy” sign.
Drunky Smurf writes:
> When Roman Polanski drugged and raped a 13 teen year old girl so many Hollywood
> elite came to his defense and said it was no big deal.
We discussed this in 2009 when the U.S. government tried to extradite Polanski from Switzerland when he was visiting there. There was a petition signed by various people associated with the world film community. Here’s an article with a list of those people:
Here are the people on that list who are American:
Woody Allen
Wes Anderson
Darren Aronofsky
Jonathan Demme
Scott Foundas
Terry Gilliam
Buck Henry
Kent Jones
John Landis
David Lynch
Michael Mann
Alexander Payne
Jerry Schatzberg
Julian Schnabel
Martin Scorcese
So, among 136 signers of that petition, only 15 are American, and I probably shouldn’t include Terry Gilliam, since he hasn’t lived in the U.S. for a long time and is no longer an American citizen. Scott Foundas and Kent Jones are film critics and thus not really part of the Hollywood establishment. Every one of the 12 remaining Americans are directors, basically directors whose films are somewhat different from the usual Hollywood fare. I have to wonder if they were all at a party one night and all got drunk. Someone pulled out a copy of the petition and said, “Hey, let’s all sign this.”
The rest of the 136 aren’t Americans and are hardly part of the Hollywood elite. I suspect that most of them didn’t even care whether Polanski was really guilty of anything. They are the sort of non-Americans whose view is that any time the U.S. government asks a foreign government to do anything, it’s obviously a trick that the U.S. is pulling on the rest of the world. They believe that there must be a hidden motive for the U.S. government to try to extradite anyone. They believe that you have to ignore whatever crime the person being extradited has committed and refuse to do it, since otherwise you’re bowing to the power of the U.S.
Saw it yesterday.
Based on the response I expected the movie to pretty much ignore the ethical issues of what he did.
It did not. Prior to him waking her up there is an extended sequence of him dealing with those questions, battling the urge to wake her up so he wouldn’t be alone and regretting that he was doing it while he was doing it.
And once she learns she has nothing to do with her until the prospect of “rescue” and then mortal danger forces them to work together again.
Do I think it handled the issue particularly well? Not necessarily, on the way home after I detailed four ways I think it could have been handled better and been more interesting. But it was addressed way more, and better, than I’d been lead to expect.
Interesting note here.
The Plot Of Passengers Seems To Be Based On This Old '50s Comic Strip
A question for those who have seen it:
Why would there be enough food on board for him to survive to old age, if all of the passengers were supposed to be sleeping?
Was this food that was being brought with them to the new world?
Wow. Earlier in the thread I proposed basically this exact same plot! I swear I have never heard of this comic.
Oh no, science fiction portrays a murky ethical issue regarding an extreme, unusual situation. RAPE CULTURE! RAPE CULTURE EVERYWHERE! I’m just going to assume that this movie glorifies rape and celebrates the partriachy’s constant rape! I must shield my eyes from this atrocity! No need to see it to see if it actually portrays it that way, someone else giving a very slanted and inaccurate take gave me the rape culture warning!
SAFE SPACE! SAFE SPACE! FICTION SHOULDN’T CHALLENGE PEOPLE! ANYTHING THAT SHOWS PEOPLE DOING BAD THINGS MUST BE GLORIFYING THOSE BAD THINGS!
I can’t wait until art is incredibly boring and unchallenging and stripped of anything that might possibly offend people whose main hobby is to find something to be offended by.
Don’t forget JLaw wipes her ass on sacred rocks and Chris Pratt took a job away from an ACTUAL Star Lord.
The criticisms generally aren’t that the movie can’t present a murky ethical issue but that the movie is unaware that it has done so.
I mostly disagree with that criticism, but if you’re going to use Drudge headlines to try and mock people at least mock them for what they’re doing.
Honey,
the intended plan is that they’re put to sleep on Earth, put on the ship and then spend 120 years in transit. They’ll be awoken four months before their arrival for essentially a super long mixer/bacchanalia on a super swank cruise ship before beginning their lives on a frontier planet.
There are other things in the movie where you wonder why they’d be set up that way if nobody was supposed to be awake mid-trip, but the food is well explained.
The plot of the movie doesn’t piss me off as the ad campaign which still directly lies to the public, stating that they were both awakened accidentally, and which doesn’t even hint of the of the conflict between them because of what he did. It is one thing to claim that they just didn’t emphasize that major(in my opinion) plot line-it is another to directly lie.
The premise as described in the critique actually makes it sound more interesting than the preview did. I was excited because sci-fi romance doesn’t happen too often, and it’s the genre I write.
I don’t want to see the film now because it’s gotten absolutely shit reviews. Manipulation and creepiness is one thing. Bad writing is quite another. What is the point of sci-fi if not to intelligently explore questions of morality and human nature?