Passengers (2016)
- To accurately portray their role in Passengers, Jennifer Lawrence spent weeks conducting hands-on research and rehearsing directly with director Morten Tyldum.
- Passengers utilized mostly practical sets and locations to ground the story, a specific choice insisted upon by Morten Tyldum.
Passengers is a 2016 American science fiction romance film directed by Morten Tyldum and starring Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt. The film is set aboard the Avalon, a spacecraft transporting 5,000 colonists in hibernation pods on a 120-year journey to a distant planet. When a malfunction awakens mechanical engineer Jim Preston 90 years too early, he faces the prospect of growing old and dying alone on the ship before it reaches its destination.
After a year of solitary existence, Jim makes the ethically questionable decision to deliberately wake up Aurora Lane, a journalist, condemning her to the same fate so he won't be alone. The film generated intense debate about its central moral dilemma โ Jim's decision to wake Aurora, which the film presents through a romantic lens, was viewed by many critics as a violation of consent that the screenplay failed to adequately reckon with. Defenders argued the film was exploring genuine moral complexity, while detractors felt it romanticized what amounted to imprisoning someone.
Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt brought charisma and chemistry to their roles, and the production design of the Avalon โ a sleek, luxury spacecraft with restaurants, swimming pools, and observation decks โ was visually striking. Michael Sheen provided comic relief as Arthur, a perpetually cheerful android bartender. Passengers earned $303 million worldwide on a $110 million budget, a modest return that reflected the divisive audience response.
The screenplay by Jon Spaihts had spent years on Hollywood's celebrated "Black List" of best unproduced scripts and was considered one of the most sought-after properties in the industry before its production.
