The Screen Addict | Passengers
A film has no intrinsic value. There is no possible way to ascribe an absolute worth to a work of art like we do with, for instance, an ounce of gold or a vat of raw oil. This is why ratings by critics, or even average appraisals gathered by IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes for example, are utterly meaningless to me. The experience of watching film is deeply personal. It can mean the world to one person and nothing at all to the next.
A couple of blogs back, I wrote about meeting Keanu Reeves for a project he was selling at the time. Today, the film that project eventually became, is one of my all-time favorites – but Reeves did not star in it. The film is Passengers (2016), and I will now explain in detail why it means so much to me.
Passengers follows a spaceship carrying thousands of humans on their way to a distant planet. Because the journey will take many decades to complete, the travelers are all immersed in deep cryosleep. Suddenly, something on the ship malfunctions and soon after, two passengers find themselves awake 90 years ahead of schedule…
My meeting with Reeves took place in 2013, when Passengers was still in its financing stage. Although we expressed strong enthusiasm for the script – I think we even made an offer on it – the project stalled due to lack of interest from other territories. This was before Reeves’ second resurgence following the success of John Wick (2014) – his first revival came with The Matrix (1999) but had since stalled somewhat – and most investors were not buying into his box-office potential.
The encounter with Reeves was memorable for more reasons than the fantastic script we were discussing. At the risk of sounding redundant – because I’ve made this statement on several other occasions – the actor is truly one of the nicest people in the business. I remember vividly how he complemented me on my recently acquired, ridiculously expensive Armani jacket that, to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t quite sure I could get away with. But Reeves said exactly what you would expect him to say when you know him only from his films: “Dude. That is a really cool jacket.” If Neo himself says your outfit is awesome, you pretty much have all the confirmation you will ever need.
For years, Passengers disappeared from the radar until it was finally revived with the red-hot superstar tandem Chris Pratt - Jennifer Lawrence. To direct the duo, the producers and financiers settled on the left-field choice of Norwegian filmmaker Morten Tyldum, who had previously made the excellent – but genre-wise completely opposite – Headhunters (2011) and The Imitation Game (2014). I was a skeptic, until I saw the trailer:
What is so brilliant about this promo – aside from the electrifying editing and superb soundtrack – is that it does not fall into the same trap that usually snares other promotional material. Yes, like most trailers it is too long – the industry agreed-upon length is now a staggering 150 seconds – but it still succeeds in enticing us about the plot without actually giving too much away.
[SPOILERS] If you have seen the film, you know that Pratt’s character feels so debilitatingly lonely after accidentally being awakened from his cryosleep, that he decides to sabotage Lawrence’s pod in order to wake her from her slumber as well. Obvious ethical implications prevent him from actually disclosing to her that he did what he did, so he convinces her that she was accidentally woken up, too.
The trailer does an excellent job of not giving away this crucial plot element though, and that is why the actual film still holds so many wonderful surprises. To me, the moral implications of selfishly deciding over someone else’s faith, is what is at the heart of Passengers. It is one of the most tantalizing examples of the “What Would You Do” scenario, and the main reason why I love the film so much.
On a side note – notice the trailer for the trailer at the beginning of the video. Yes, you’ve read that right. The trailer for the trailer… These days, the marketing people are so adamant to hold your focus, that they actually add a mini-trailer for the one you are about to see. Some silly algorithm probably suggested that not everyone watches trailers all the way through, and a clever exec decided it would be a good idea to double down. Data mining gone berserk.
Passengers is one of those rare films that totally lives up to the expectations raised in the trailer. It is quite something to keep a story interesting with just two characters on the screen for about 80% of the running time, but Passengers manages to do so on the strength of pitch-perfect performances by Pratt and Lawrence. I was never a big fan of the Hunger Games franchise, but Lawrence has proved since and before to be a formidable actress. Pratt steals my heart with virtually every role he plays, from Andy Dwyer in Parks and Recreation to Peter Quill in Guardians of the Galaxy (2014). I can even almost forgive him for making questionable statements about the LGBTQIA+ community due to his faith, as I always try to separate the artist from the private individual.
When other characters do show up in Passengers, it shows that the filmmakers did not cut back on the budget for supporting roles. In relatively small parts, we see venerable performers like Michael Sheen – in a wonderful homage to the bar scene from Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) – Laurence Fishburne and Andy Garcia.
Passengers makes me happy. I adore the themes of loneliness, exploration, falling in love and obsession all neatly folded into an epic SciFi-Adventure. While writing this piece, it even occurred to me that the events in the film play out like a movie-metaphor for the Kübler-Ross theory that identifies the five stages of grief – Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance.
It breaks my heart that the actor who was once so passionate about Passengers, never got a chance to see the project through. However, as a life-long dreamer and dedicated science-fiction fan, I am very confident that in an alternate universe there exists a version of the film starring Keanu Reeves. Maybe one day we will get to see it.
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Twitter (X): Robin Logjes | The Screen Addict