I’ve long maintained a practice on long-haul flights of declining to chat with the people sitting next to me. Headphones on, face set in a frown: such is my fear of 10 airless hours trapped in conversation with a stranger. But now I’ve seen Passengers, that predicament seems like a breeze compared to the plight of Aurora Lane (Jennifer Lawrence): she’s trapped for 90 years on board a spaceship with Jim Preston (Chris Pratt), and he’s the one who trapped her. Yes, it sounds like the elevator pitch for a horror film, but this is a Christmas blockbuster: Passengers, curiously, is couched as a story about love.

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In Hollywood, however, perhaps it’s not that surprising. A study published in the early part of this year indicated that women who watch films that portray aggressive, persistent male behavior – stalking, in other words – are more amenable to similar behavior in the real world. In other words, for the sake of dramatic tension, cinema sometimes normalizes abuse, recasting it as romantic. Passengers is intended to be a grand romance, but it’s also a story of a man manipulating a woman and depriving her of her agency.



The film opens with Jim’s awakening. He’s on a ship bound for a fresh new planet with 5,000 other pod-bound hibernating colonialists. They’re meant to sleep through the 120-year journey, but a malfunction has caused Jim to wake after only 30 years have elapsed. Like a fabulous sea cruiser, the ship provides all kinds of luxuries, but with everyone else fast asleep, it’s lonely. Jim has only the company of a kind android bartender and some space Roombas that suck up stray cereal. In time, isolation takes its toll. Jim starts to dress badly, and grows a beard like a Williamsburg hipster. In a state of vodka-soaked desperation, Jim happens upon Aurora’s pod, and then he begins to wonder: does he have to be so alone? Jim was a mechanical engineer back on earth and he’s read the instructions: he can wake her up.

This will ring true to anyone who’s tried online dating: Jim sees that Aurora’s beautiful, and then immerses himself in her available digital archive to learn more about her before they meet. Aurora is like everyone from Brooklyn on OKCupid: she’s a writer, she likes coffee, maybe she has some light daddy issues. It’s enough to make Jim believe he’s fallen in love. And after much equivocation over the bar with the android – he knows it’s not a very nice thing to wake her, but – Jim rouses Aurora to join him for the next 89 years.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lost in space: Sandra Bullock stalker free in Gravity. Photograph: Moviestore/REX

Sometimes what seems like the greatest love of all is really just the love of greatest proximity. Spoiler alert for anyone who’s never seen a blockbuster film about romance in space: Aurora and Jim fall in love, Aurora finds out that Jim has trapped her for life and is overcome with rage, Jim wins Aurora over again by proving his mettle when they face some peril.

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The film-makers do their work in the movie’s first act to build our sympathy for Jim – yes, we’d be lonely, too. But it’s hard to ignore that he has created a condition from which Aurora cannot escape, and in which she must become dependent upon him. How fortunate she is that he is classically handsome and kind; how different the film would be if he was played by, say, Christopher Walken. The film seems to want us to believe that Aurora’s feelings are as uncomplicated as possible, but she’s showing signs of Stockholm syndrome, remarking in a voiceover about how they would have never gotten together if he wasn’t, you know, essentially the last man alive.

Then again, what else could motivate her? “I hope you meet someone,” says her best friend on Earth in an earnest farewell message – for what more could a young and beautiful woman wish for on an intergalactic adventure? Jim is a variety of the archetypal Nice Guy: he’ll do anything for Aurora, so should she really be so mad that he ruined her life by waking her early? “It’s a murder!” she bellows, but she’s silenced in time: Jim performs heroism and Aurora realizes that she shouldn’t have been so ungrateful. He is, it turns out, her everything; he’s made it so.



Years ago, after sobbing with fear through a screening of Gravity, I turned to my companion and asked: “Why doesn’t anyone ever make a movie where people go to space, have a nice time, and then get home safely?” The answer of course is that it would be a boring movie. I can forgive Passengers to some extent because no one wants to see a film about two people coming together on equal terms, demonstrating mutual kindness and respect and having a nice time. Aurora says she embarked on the space journey because she was seeking material for her writing. There are no good love stories without conflict. But outside the movies, love may sometimes be better without good stories.