Always listen to Adele! Queen of taking breaks! Queen of quality over quantity! It’s a lesson Jennifer Lawrence has learned, but not before making a movie that even she agrees is a bit of a stinker. And her friend warned her not to do it.
Speaking to the New York Times about her career’s ups and downs, the Oscar winner revealed that prior to making Passengers—I’ll get to the plot in a sec—the singer tried to discourage her from taking the project. “She was like, ‘I feel like space movies are the new vampire movies,’ ” Lawrence said, per People. “I should have listened to her.”
Okay, in fairness to Lawrence’s judgment, at the time, this was considered a plum assignment. The script, by Jon Spaihts, sold in a “bidding war” and had previously had A-listers like Keanu Reeves, Rachel McAdams, and Reese Witherspoon attached. She was not the only person who thought it was going to be a hit, and given her youth, she’s hardly the person who should have known better. The only problem with Passengers is that the script, which leaked online before the movie came out and was dunked on because it’s terrible, is terrible.
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(Spoilers ahead) Passengers is about a man (Chris Pratt) who is supposed to travel for 300 years or something in suspended animation in a spaceship to reach a far planet, but his pod breaks and he wakes up. He’s lonely and falls in love with a woman who is also asleep (Lawrence) based on how pretty she is and also her writing (she writes for The New Yorker and he can access her articles in space, whatever), so he wakes her up to be the Eve to his Adam and doesn’t tell her that he’s basically ruined her life. It’s like Sleeping Beauty? But also? Horrific? She figures it out; they fight; they make love. This is the line that got Twitter snickering: “Nobody strands me on a spaceship for a hundred years. I work for the New Yorker. I’ll write an exposé so hot you’ll need oven mitts to read it. Trust me.” If I recall correctly, that line got cut before the movie actually hit theaters, but it’s still really bad!
And the plot was misogynistic! And it came out right after Trump was elected so people were pissed. None of that is Jennifer Lawrence’s fault but, yes, she should have listened to Adele. As we all should, in the car, while crying!
