Passengers Movie Analysis

Formal Analysis of the movie, "Passengers" (2016)
It’s a bit of a shame that the new Jennifer Lawrence / Chris Pratt movie Passengers got so slammed by critics. It’s not that I disagree with the consensus take on it, but I didn’t see as much engagement with what the movie was saying prior to the collapse at the end as I might have liked. It is indeed true that the movie instill a feeling of “being lost”. The end is a huge mess that undermines the rest of what has happened to that point, but through the first and second acts, it’s a pretty interesting movie with some provocative and intense ideas. It balances dark and terrible notions with a sense of fun and an identifiable, resonant humanity. In the end, the fun ends up inappropriately downplaying how terrible the ideas, but earlier on, it was a spoon full of sugar that made the medicine watchable.
Passengers have not been well received. It seems like the criticism falls into two categories.

Or at least it would be if the ending didn’t entirely sell it out. Chris Pratt is on this colony-bound spaceship, and he’s the only one who wakes up. He has the Home Alone Hero’s Journey: first he’s confused, then he’s happy, and he plays video games and eats sushi every night and drinks whiskey with a robot bartender. He’s racking up a debt on his charge account he will have to pay later, but it’ll be decades before Earth gets his distress call, decades before any answer reaches him, and he’ll be long dead before anyone else wakes up. But this only lasts so long. He’s alone on the ship (robot bartender notwithstanding) for over a year, and he descends into madness. He walks around naked for months. He grows a huge mountain man beard. He takes spacewalks in a space suit and just stands on the hull of the ship and stares out into the void. At one point he attempts suicide by almost shoving himself out an