What makes a movie "unethical"?
What makes a movie unethical is how it portrays unethical evil actions by one or more of the characters in the movie.
It's not a question of whether the characters, even the main protagonist, do evil things. That's completely normal storytelling and to be expected. The villains and antagonists often do evil unethical things as a matter of course, to create conflict and for the protagonists to overcome and defeat. Some more daring stories are not that straightforward "good vs. evil" and it may even be that the main protagonist of the story is the one doing a completely unethical evil thing. Maybe it was a mistake, maybe it was a lapse of judgment, maybe it was a split-second decision done in the heat of the moment, to be deeply regretted afterwards, or maybe it may even be that the protagonist is not a 100% good person and has character flaws, even extremely hideous ones.
Sometimes it can be good storytelling to show the main protagonist doing something evil, something completely unethical (we are humans after all, and sometimes we do evil things, by mistake or intentionally).
The question is: How does the story, the movie in this case, depict the action? Does the protagonist, who did the evil thing, deeply regret his actions and is remorseful, and perhaps gets either absolution (but still understanding that what he did was wrong) or some kind of punishment? Or does, perhaps, the story kind of not take any stances about it, and just leaves it as is, without the evildoer getting his punishment? In other words, does the story just depict the harsh reality of the human condition as it is, and leave it at that?
Or does the movie, like Passengers, just imply that while it perhaps might have been a bit unethical, all was well in the end? Does the movie justify, directly or indirectly, the action and dismiss it by the end, and have everybody just live happily ever after, without the protagonist not so much as showing deep remorse and regret, and on the contrary just reaping the rewards of the evil unethical thing he did, without lasting repercussions?
Even that last thing could ostensibly be handled in a proper manner by the story, but I really don't think this movie handled it well at all. It really, really left a bad taste in my mouth.
Synopsis
WARNING: Heavy spoilers ahead. It's impossible to describe what I'm talking about without spoiling the events of almost the entire movie, so be warned. If you want to see the movie without being spoiled about its contents, don't continue reading this blog post.
The events of the movie happen far in the future in a colonization ship on its way to a distant earth-like planet, with five thousand colonists and a couple hundred crew members in deep hibernation, as the travel time to that distant world is over a hundred years.
The spaceship in question is extremely luxurious, and the plan is to revive the colonists and crew four months before arrival, allowing them to be educated to their work at the new planet, while essentially living in a high-class luxury passenger spaceship.
However, 19 years into the trip, with 90 years to go, a malfunction causes one of the colonists (acted by Chris Pratt) to be prematurely revived from his hibernation pod. He quite quickly realizes what has happened, finds out that there's no way to go back to hibernation (the process of hibernation requires specialized equipment and personnel that doesn't exist in the ship), and that there's absolutely nothing he can do about it. He tries contacting Earth for advise, but it's completely useless because the roundtrip for the message and its response will take over 50 years. There are no escape pods, there is no going back to hibernation, there is no turning the ship back, and he is destined to live the rest of his life alone in that luxury ship.
Sure, the ultra-futuristic ship has everything he could ever dream of: Luxurious habitats, all the entertainment he wants, and even robotic personnel. However, he is condemned to live the rest of his life there, alone, and there's nothing he can do about it.
Or is there? After a very long time of depression and even suicidal thoughts, when examining the hibernation pods of the other people he gets infatuated with one of the women, and at some point gets the idea to sabotage her hibernation pod so that she, too, gets revived prematurely.
So he does so, but he lies to her and pretends that she was revived also because of a technical malfunction. He hides the truth from her. Understandably she becomes equally desperate and depressed. Eventually she finds out the truth and becomes even more angry and depressed. However, eventually, after years of cohabiting the huge ship with the protagonist, she falls in love with him.
88 years later, when the rest of the passengers are revived, they find out all the stuff that the couple had done during the voyage (including a huge garden in the middle of a promenade).
(There are quite many other things that happen during the movie, but this is enough to get the gist of what I'm writing about here.)
Why it's unethical
It should be quite obvious why the actions of the protagonist were egregiously unethical: He willingly and purposefully condemned another innocent human being to the same fate as his, just because he felt lonely.
Sure, the prospect of having to live alone for the rest of your life is daunting and depressing (and can cause really bad depression and even suicidal thoughts), but that's absolutely no justification to condemn another person to the same fate, especially when it happens without the agreement and consent of that other person. Doing that was just outright unethical and evil, but it was much more so because he had absolutely no idea how she would react to it. For all he knew she might have just committed suicide a few weeks or months after waking up. Or she could have ended up a depressed wreck who would never want to interact with him and would definitely not fall in love with him.
And on top of everything else, he doubled down on the unethical evil nature of his actions by lying to her, by trying to conceal his actions from her, pretending that he didn't do anything and that it was just a malfunction, when in fact it was he who deliberately sabotaged the hibernation pod.
While his action was unethical, that's not what makes the movie itself unethical. What makes the movie unethical is how it's portrayed in the end. It's portrayed more like "ok, maybe it was a bit bad, but it turned out well in the end, and they lived happily ever after. All's well that ends well." This is, essentially, a situation of Stockholm Syndrome depicted as acceptable and fine.
And that is what makes the movie itself unethical. Portraying such a despicable evil unethical act as not such a biggie, like it were just a minor thing that in the end resulted in a good thing.
How it should have ended
There are so many ways in which this same story could have been handled significantly better. Here are some ideas:
The "bittersweet ending"
The movie is exactly the same up until he's just about to sabotage the woman's hibernation pod. However, he stops himself on the very last second. It's just wrong. It's too unethical. He can't condemn another human being to the same horrible fate. He gets depressed, he gets angry, he punches a wall, but in the end he just can't do it, so he leaves the pod alone and walks away.
Cue a montage of him becoming deeply depressed, sometimes getting fits of anger, doing nothing but sleep all day doing nothing, sometimes even going to the woman's hibernation pod, clearly contemplating sabotaging it after all but not actually doing it, and several times clearly contemplating suicide.
However, he eventually learns to cope with his situation and starts making better of it. He uses the vast library of literature and learning material in the ship to learn technology and engineering (which comes handy when some crucial part of the ship malfunctions, similarly to what happened in the actual movie), as well as art, such as music, writing and painting. Maybe he starts going every day to the hibernation pods and talking to the people there; sure, he knows they can't hear him, but he still talks to them just so he doesn't go completely insane. He may even write and read poems and songs to the woman that he got so infatuated with.
90 years later, when the rest of the passengers and crew are revived, they find out what happened, and all the works of art that he created during his lifetime. Paintings, murals, writings, poems, recorded pieces of music. An entire legacy of work, which the movie implies might end up in a museum in the new world.
Now that would have been a good sci-fi movie. A very typical well-written sci-fi story, ones that big sci-fi authors wrote all the time since the 50's onward.
The "dark ending"
The movie is the same up until some time after he sabotaged the woman's hibernation pod and, much later, she finds out the truth about it. She becomes extremely angry and aggressive, and eventually she becomes deeply depressed. Cue depression montage. After an unspecified amount of time the protagonist finds her having committed suicide.
He becomes extremely shocked and depressed himself, realizing the horrendous thing he did, which caused another human being, one he was infatuated with, to take her own life. The rest of the movie is extremely dark and depressing.
90 years later the rest of the passengers are revived and they find out what happened. They find out evidence of someone who had gone completely insane with grief and depression. The movie leaves it unclear whether he committed suicide or died of old age, giving a bit of hints of either, just to make the ending even darker.
Not all movies, especially sci-fi ones, need some kind of happy ending. Sometimes stories can be very dark and depressing, without any kind of happy or even bittersweet ending. And, in this case, the movie would have implied a moral lesson: Just because you may find yourself in such a situation doesn't mean you have the right to drag someone else with you.
The "even darker ending"
The same as above, but at some point, perhaps many years later, in his completely lunatic insanity, he becomes jealous of all the other passengers who will get to the destination while he has to suffer alone for the rest of his life, and he starts murdering all of them in their hibernation pods, one by one. After all that, he commits suicide, and the movie ends with him hanging by his neck inside an empty silent ship.
This would be quite an unsatisfactory ending even for the viewers, but not all stories need to be satisfactory. Sometimes darker stories want to punch the viewers as well. There would be no moral to this story. It would just be dark for the sake of being dark. And that's sometimes ok too, as long as the movie isn't promoting the unethical actions, depicting them as somehow justified or acceptable by the end.
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