Commentary: ‘Passengers’ Characters Need To Be Reminded Of Their Emotions

Writing is a lot harder than it seems. Well, that’s not necessarily true. Writing is very easy. Anybody can sit down and come up with a story. But good writing can be very tricky. It requires a skill to be able to communicate with the audience without directly talking to them. This is done through characters and plot points that try to draw certain emotions out of the audience. Writers are, essentially, puppet masters and architects designing sequences to elicit a certain outcome. But there are times when writers can write themselves into a corner where they need a character to act a certain way but are unable to find a compelling reason to make that happen. Instead, they resort to tricks and easy solutions. Passengers does this during one of its pivotal moments.

Starring Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence, the film centers on a man who wakes up about ninety years prematurely on a century-long space flight. Initially, he tries to put himself back to sleep or just deal with the isolation alone. But he gives in to his solitude and wakes up a fellow passenger. Together, they seem to fall in love and appear to be happy in a way they never were in their previous lives. This falls apart when Lawrence’s character eventually learns Pratt was the one who woke her up, essentially dooming her to grow old and die on the ship.

Before he wakes her up, Pratt toils endlessly with the decision. He stalks her by looking up her file and learning everything he can about her. From a writing standpoint, this is a very useful and clever tool in order to flesh out Lawrence’s backstory so that the audience, as well as Pratt, can understand her. But after she learns the truth, she grows extremely angry, and rightfully so. But in order for the movie to come to a satisfying conclusion in its third arc, the two of them have to reconcile in some fashion. In order to do this, she views goodbye videos from her friends. In all these videos, the friends state how unhappy she was in her life, essentially reminding her about the sadness she felt prior to meeting Pratt. Together they were happy, when neither of them were alone. She had a right to be angry that he woke her up, but it was almost like she couldn’t remember her sadness on her own. She needed videos to remind her of that, which is a poor storytelling device in order to further the character and relieve Pratt’s character of his culpability.

Passengers is now streaming on Starz.