The worst part of this trailer is that it takes all of the thrilling space dangers we've seen played up in the other trailers (nose-diving into the boiling heart of a star, swimming in a giant pool that ends up drowning Jennifer Lawrence in a zero-gravity nightmare, falling off the hull of the ship and floating away in space) and makes them seem like a wacky montage that eventually brings Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence closer together. There is no tension, no thrills, no sense of stakes or even that anything is even wrong. To reiterate, this is a movie ostensibly about two passengers on a cryogenic ark ship who wake up 90 years before they reach their destination and realize that there is an insidious conspiracy underlying the whole trip, one that threatens to kill everyone on board and keep them from altering the plan.
The first trailer struck a pretty good balance between "strangely romantic" (cute robot love notes) and "deeply unsettling," (scary robot bartender torso), while the second trailer made the movie seem like a paranoid sci-fi thriller (there's a reason they were woken up too soon!). One thing that was always clear was that this was a life-or-death struggle set in the vacuum of space. It was not "500 Days of Summer."
We had pretty high hopes for this movie—Passengers seemed like it could be interesting, even if the premise used familiar sci-fi tropes. A romance between two lonely people trapped aboard a spaceship until they die might be kind of neat, in a messed-up way. But this new trailer may confirm that neither the marketing team nor the producers could figure out what this movie was, or how it should be pitched to audiences. If you can't figure out whether this is a date movie or a lighter version of Event Horizon after three trailers, it usually means that something has gone off the rails.
Passengers hits US theaters December 21st, 2016.