A film critic has resurfaced dissaproval of the 2016 sci-fi movie "Passengers," which at the time of its release was blasted as having a backward, sexist plot.
"Passengers" is a sci-fi flick directed by Morten Tyldum and starring Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence as two passengers on a space-bound colonization ship who were supposed to be asleep for the 120-year journey. A ship malfunction awakes Pratt's character, Jim Preston. Panicking at having to spend decades alone on the ship, Jim discovers and falls for another passenger named Aurora Lane and decides to intentionally wake her up too. It isn't until halfway through the film she discovers his selfish deed.
The film was blasted as sexist and misogynistic by several outlets.
"Let's Talk About Passengers and its Weird Sexism," a Huffington Post headline read, saying that the film promotes "the idea of a woman as object."
"Passengers is Sexist Nonsense," agreed the movie blog Film School Rejects, calling it an "outdated and offensive fairy tale in disguise."
So when a film critic suggested an alternative plot last week, she gained plenty of fans.
"This would’ve been so much better if a) Jennifer Lawrence was the protagonist instead of Chris Pratt and b) it was a horror-thriller where she slowly realized he was the one who woke her up and only because he thought she was hot," Zoë Rose Bryant, a member of the Hollywood Critics Association, tweeted.
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Several Twitter users agreed that the story could have been better if it had been told through Aurora's point of view.
"If they wanted to make this genuinely romantic they could’ve had them wake up at the same time cause their systems shorted and then slowly try to work out their situation with cute banter, high stakes and not like forcing her to be with him," another user offered. "But i do love the horror concept."
"Agreed," another user said. "The ending also needed to be her going back to sleep and getting her life back. He should not have been rewarded for his behavior."
"Should've been The Shining in space," another said.
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Others were offended that the film took a romantic turn considering Jim "abducted" Aurora.
"RIGHT trying to make that romantic was soooo nasty i wanna see ur version," one user said in response to Bryant's plot twist.
"It was a film that was so close to being brilliant, and then just completely threw away the thing that made it so interesting in order to manufacture a romance," another said.
Others suggested that the film tried to use Pratt's charm to offset his character's terrible behavior.
Adele had infamously warned Lawrence to decline the project.
"Adele told me not to do it!" Lawrence revealed to The New York Times. "She was like, ‘I feel like space movies are the new vampire movies.’ I should have listened to her."
