FORCE MAJEURE Director Explains His Rejected Take on PASSENGERS
Chalk this up as yet another one of those "what if?" Hollywood missed connections. Passengers, the sci-fi movie starring Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence, ended up being...not great. Despite being a vehicle for two of the world's hottest movie stars, the film's marketing team did a pretty crafty job of hiding the movie's main conflict from all of its trailers and TV spots. I'm going to give away the film's premise, so if you don't want to know what it's really about, turn back now.
While the trailers make you think that Pratt and Lawrence's characters are woken up from cryo-sleep at the same time (90 years before their ship arrives at its destination), that's not the case. Pratt's chamber malfunctions and he spends a year trying to fix it. When he realizes that he'll be forced to spend the rest of his life on board a massive spaceship all alone, he decides to wake Lawrence's character up so he won't be lonely. It's a horrible thing to do to someone, and that decision hangs over their ensuing romance for the rest of the film.
But Ruben Ostlund, the director of the Swedish language hit Force Majeure, had a different take on the movie that sounds like it would have been much more interesting. Screencrush points us to a Variety interview in which Ostlund explains how his vision would have differed from what we saw on screen:
There was one film I really wanted to do that has been made now. That was ‘Passengers.’ But I wanted to change the setup of ‘Passengers.’ The main character is a guy who wakes up in one of those pods on a spaceship. I wanted to put his family in the other pods, his wife and kids. Then there’s this dilemma: He’s going to die on the ship because the travel takes 300 years. If he wakes up his kids, they will die on the spaceship and not on the planet they’re heading for; if he wakes up his wife, then the kids will not have a mother when they arrive. So of course, you have to wake up another woman, because you don’t want to be alone. Then you can swipe on pictures to see the women, like Tinder. You have to decide on the pictures and pick someone. To bring things [like] that would be relevant in contemporary times. But when I pitched this to the producers, I think they got scared.
Adding that family element makes the decision much more complicated than the one Pratt's character makes in the version we saw (which was directed by Morten Tyldum), and in a movie that was in desperate need of some creative storytelling help, this may have been enough to make its concept more palatable for the people who saw it. It obviously didn't happen, but I like Ostlund's thinking here and hope he brings that same thoughtful outlook to whatever he directs next.