The plot of the movie Passengers was so off-putting that Vulture wrote a post for potential viewers warning them not to expect the epic space romance the film’s marketing had suggested. Well, in a new interview with Variety, Swedish director Ruben Östlund (Force Majeure) talks about how he once had his heart set on directing Passengers, and about his suggested plot, which would have been even more twisted than the final product.
“The main character is a guy who wakes up in one of those pods on a spaceship,†Östlund explains. “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.â€
So in addition to the creepy morality-cracking problems of the actual Passengers film, Jim would also have to tell Aurora, “And I did it because you’re expendable and my family isn’t.†Cold.