Chris Pratt’s film career may largely be defined by his work in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Jurassic World films, and voicing the lead role of The Super Mario Bros. Movie. By that same notion, Jennifer Lawrence made a name for herself by starring in The Hunger Games movies and the X-Men franchise. Lawrence went on to Oscar glory by winning Best Actress for Silver Linings Playbook, but even Pratt has had roles in Oscar-winning movies like Zero Dark Thirty and Her. There’s only one movie where the two stars overlapped however, and it was a movie that didn’t arrive without controversy, 2016’s Passengers. If you haven’t seen the film, you’re in luck as Passengers can now be streamed online for free, but you should know some viewers have a real problem with it.
Where is Passengers streaming?
Though available to rent and own on other digital platforms, as of this month, Passengers (2016) is streaming for free on Amazon’s ad-supported streaming service, FreeVee. You can watch the film here.
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What is Passengers about?
Chris Pratt stars as Jim in Passengers, one of the many people aboard The Avalon, a large spaceship traveling from Earth to a different planet on a 120-year trip. To combat that long journey, the colonists and crew for the ship are placed in stasis and are asleep for that entire amount of time; however, after an asteroid hits the ship and damages it, Jim wakes up. The trouble is he’s now alive and on the ship with 90 years to go before its journey is over and with no way back into his pod.
After some time alone, Jim sees a beautiful woman also stuck in stasis, Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence). Hoping for companionship, he wrestles with the potential of reviving her despite knowing that it would mean she would die before they arrived on the planet. Despite his moral quandary, he revives Aurora and lets her believe it was an accident, keeping up the ruse that they were both awakened by the same issue. As his masterplan would have it, the pair begin to fall for each other as the only awake humans aboard the ship…
Why is Passengers controversial?
As noted above, Chris Pratt’s Jim wakes up Jennifer Lawrence’s Aurora early under the guise of tricking her and hoping she will fall for him. After she believes his lie, his plan works, though upon learning the truth Aurora rejects Jim and even attacks him. As other problems arise on the ship their romance rekindles as they work together to save the ship, where in the end they leave behind a recording of their story for the hibernating crew to learn decades later.
Passengers was seen as controversial for a few reasons, but mostly because the movie essentially frames Jim’s gaslighting manipulation as a grand romantic gesture. Jim purposefully wakes up Aurora, dooming her to die alongside him, exclusively because he finds her pretty and wants a human companion. To make matters worse, by the end of the movie this is seen as not all that bad.
To make the controversy even worse, the film’s marketing lead audiences astray before it was even released. If you paid attention to the trailers for Passengers you would perhaps thing that the film was just about a whirlwind romance on a space station, where the two characters woke up by accident and fell in love as they worked together to keep the ship stable and safe. Though that is a partially true summation of Passengers, it didn’t paint the full story, leading many audience members to feel like they had been tricked. One might argue that this was being done to preserve the secrets of the film, but just like the movie itself, it was a manipulation tactic.
This was even noted in the many reviews to the film as well.
Passengers on Rotten Tomatoes
Passengers as a 30%, or “Rotten,” rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The critical consensus for the movie does praise the chemistry between Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence, however it does note that “even their chemistry isn’t enough to overcome a fatally flawed story.”
Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post rated Passengers a 1.5 out of 4, writing that the film “hinges on a morally dubious act that the filmmakers gloss over in a series of creepy justifications and a sudden third-act reversal.”
Katie Rife of AV Club gave Passengers a C-, adding that: “The major creative players either didn’t realize that they were essentially making a feature-length ad for Stockholm syndrome, or that they didn’t really care.”
So if you’re planning to watch Passengers, maybe going in ahead of time knowing that the film has a creepy undertone might make you like it more, or maybe it will make you like it less. You can watch it for free at least.