After being woken up 90 years early, Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence are forced to fight a series of critical failures on Avalon, the ship that’s supposed to take them and thousands of others to a distant colony. However, those malfunctions might not be an accident.
In the latest TV promo for Passengers, the star-crossed lovers shed some light on what’s causing the ship to have problems with its robots, gravity, and overall proximity to danger. Aurora declares that there’s something “they’re” not telling us (although she doesn’t say who “they” are) and James seemingly confirms our fears that something more nefarious is going on.
“This isn’t an accident,” he says.
The original 2007 Black List script details everything as being a series of critical failures that all started with James’s pod being accidentally opened too early. However, this latest version looks to have changed the story. The strongest evidence is the increased crew presence in the film. In the original script, the only other character to wake up is Gus Mansuco, a crew chief (now played by Laurence Fishburn) who helps James and Aurora figure out what’s going on.
However, we’ve now got a bunch of crew members, including Andy Garcia’s mysterious character, who’s unnamed on IMDb but goes by Norris on his jacket lapel. Norris isn’t mentioned anywhere in the original script, and his presence indicates that something bigger is going on. If it’s not just an accident, then that means someone’s doing damage on purpose. It could be related to the ship’s parent company, Homestead, which makes billions of dollars on every one of these flights. According to the original story, it’s not Homestead’s first voyage.
We won’t know more until the movie comes out on Christmas, but it’s exciting to think of a larger conspiracy at work than simply “random malfunctions” causing all the damage.
