was anyone else honestly disturbed by the Passengers discourse?
I just can’t fathom any human being with a scrap of empathy saying “well if you were a GOOD PERSON your response to a lifetime of solitary confinement would be to INSTANTLY become a HYPER-IDEALIZED FATHER FIGURE with ZERO EMOTIONAL NEEDS”
So I should start by noting: I haven’t actually seen Passengers, or encountered very much of the discourse to which you refer. I know the basic plot concept from Internet spoilers, and I’ve seen seen a couple of cutesy Tumblr fanfics about the Chris Pratt character making some different choices. But if there are relevant subtleties that can be drawn out of the text itself, or facets of the discourse that feature people being especially callous, I’m totally missing them.
That said –
It sounds as though, if you read it along the grain, Passengers is not a moral-dilemma story so much as a temptation story. And a very powerful one. (Unusually so, given that these days we don’t have a lot of cultural energy invested in the concept of resisting temptation.)
“You are in a monstrous, terrible, mind-and-soul-destroying situation. For reasons that are not your fault, you have been sentenced to lifelong solitary confinement. Your only hope of ever knowing any human contact…is to condemn another innocent to your situation so that at least you can have a cellmate. At best, this will be awful for her, a cruelty that she didn’t do anything to deserve – a life-with-two is better than a life-with-one, but it’s still not what anyone wants, it’s still the destruction of all her hopes and dreams and joys for the sake of your own sanity. Will you inflict that on someone else? How much will you suppress your own needs for the sake of others?”
There is clearly a correct answer here, a heroic answer, according to Normal-Person Conventional Morality. Heroes are un-selfish enough that they’re willing to suffer harm to save others. That’s pretty much the choice being presented here.
Given that, it’s unfair to call the Chris Pratt character a monster. He may have failed his moral test, but it was an astonishingly difficult one, and there’s an awful lot of room between “hero” and “monster.”
It is also unfair to castigate people for fantasizing about the version of the story where he is that heroic, and manages to pull off his heroism with style and grace. The Hyper-Idealized Father Figure version of the character is a totally legit moral exemplar, and I’m not opposed to people telling admiring stories about moral exemplars.
One way or another, it seems like a bad plan to insist that this Extreme Space Trolley Problem is a direct metaphor for real-life much-smaller-bore conflicts of personal interest.