Sci-Fi Thriller Superstar Flop On Prime Video Finds New Life

For those who aren’t familiar with the film, Passengers was written by Jon Spaihts, who is best known for penning such hits as Doctor Strange and both Denis Villeneuve-directed Dune films. Though Spaihts originally penned the screenplay for Passengers all the way back in 2007, the film languished in development hell for many years, with numerous directors swapping into and out of the project before eventually landing on the The Imitation Game filmmaker Morten Tyldum.

The narrative of Passengers centers on a luxurious interstellar cruiser loaded with thousands of galactic colonizers in cryosleep, who depart Earth in order to serve as the first ever citizens of a second inhabitable planet. As the ship hurls through space on autopilot, the passengers and crew members are meant to remain in hibernation for roughly 120 years, though a mechanical malfunction of some sort causes a low-level engineer to wake up 90 years too early.

The engineer, as portrayed by Chris Pratt, makes several attempts to get back into his pod and return to his stasis, before eventually succumbing to the reality that he may live out the rest of his days in miserable solitude. After contemplating suicide, he eventually resolves to do something reprehensible, by intentionally waking up another passenger, played by Jennifer Lawrence, essentially dooming her to an eternity of forced companionship and an early demise. Over the course of the film, the passengers learn to love one another’s company, up until Lawrence’s character learns the cause of her early awakening.

Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt were hailed for their performances in Passengers, despite the film itself receiving poor critical reviews. Today, the film maintains a paltry 30 percent critic score on Rotten Tomatoes. As many people have pointed out online, Passengers could have significantly benefited from some plot restructuring, and could have truly been a more memorable film if the perspective of the audience were shifted to follow Jennifer Lawrence’s journey in the film instead of Pratt’s.

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Clearly, these flaws don’t seem to be a deal breaker for certain home viewers, as the film is currently doing huge numbers on its newfound streaming home. For those interested in catching Passengers themselves, or those just in need of a rewatch, the film is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video. Just be sure to invite a few friends over before you stream the movie, as the crushing loneliness of watching it yourself might lead you to make some questionable decisions… like condemning a beautiful woman to an early grave, or eating an entire large pizza in one sitting.