A lot of people had a lot of problems with last year's sci-fi drama Passengers. Now, Jennifer Lawrence has spoken out on her thoughts concerning the film's critical reception. While the actress says that she's still proud of the film overall, she does admit that she really didn't see the problem with the movie at the time, and she wishes she'd given the film a closer look before getting involved with it. According to Lawrence...
I'm disappointed in myself that I didn't spot it. I thought the script was beautiful--it was this tainted, complicated love story. It definitely wasn't a failure. I'm not embarrassed by it by any means. There was just stuff that I wished I'd looked into deeper before jumping on.
Passengers sees Chris Pratt as a man on an intergalactic journey who's awoken from his suspended animation far too early. In order to escape the utter loneliness of the experience, he makes the decision to wake up another passenger, played by Jennifer Lawrence. While the film set up was an incredibly promising look at somebody who makes a terrible decision due to terrible circumstances, the problem that most had with the film was that it never even attempted to resolve the issue, instead devolving into a standard sci-fi action movie with a traditional romance.
Jennifer Lawrence, to her credit, doesn't try to avoid the issue in her comments to Vogue. Instead, she owns the fact that she just didn't see the issue with the script that so many others did. If she had, it's possible it could have been handled differently. Lawrence says she liked the "tainted, complicated love story" and most moviegoers would probably agree that that portion of the film was by far the most compelling. It's what makes the film's ending so frustrating, it ultimately avoids any attempt at answering the complicated questions that it asks at the beginning.
Sometimes you can just be too close to something to be able to see it clearly, and that appears to be what happened here. Jennifer Lawrence doesn't argue that the problem that many had with Passengers wasn't a legitimate problem. Instead, she simply says that she didn't see it. Implying that if she had, she would have tried to address it in some way. Many have already tried to address the issue in numerous ways, including re-editing the film so that it opens with Lawerence character waking. The audience then has to figure out what's going on in the same way that she does.
If there's one thing that Passengers succeeded in doing right, it made itself a topic of conversation. We're still talking about it and something should be said for that.
