This is a deeper film than most people realized -- it's more than just a glossy sci-fi ride.

Rating: 7/10 (1 January 2019)

The interstellar starship is one of the major science-fiction tropes. If, as "Passengers" does, you decide to go with the laws of physics and accept sub-light-speed, then it means taking decades or centuries to go between stars. So then, either you put your crew and passengers into hibernation and completely automate the ship; or else build a ship that people can live in for generations -- so that most of the passengers will live out their whole lives on it and never see the final destination. "Passengers" effectively invites us to see what both possibilities would be like.
In either case the ship has to be BIG, and the one designed for this film is a beauty. It gets lots of screen time too, and for me it was almost the star of the show. (It's fun comparing it with the nicely done interPLANETARY ships for other space movies like "The Martian", "2010", or the iconic "2001" -- interstellar is a whole different category of complexity.) In general, the sets for both interiors and exterior are well worked out.
(Caution: some spoilers ahead. My comments will make more sense if you've already seen the film.)
By contrast with the ship, the storyline and the cast of characters are pared down to an absolute minimum while it confronts us with some challenging moral issues. Some years into the voyage to a new colony, Something Goes Wrong -- the ship passes through a cloud of meteroids that partially damage the ship's systems. (Science detour here -- deep interstellar space isn't like an asteroid belt and it shouldn't have much more than sparse gas and dust, not big hunks of rock. They might have found another plot device to get the same result.) A single random passenger, mechanic Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) is accidentally woken from hibernation. The voyage still has 88 years to go. The crew, who might be able to fix tings, are also in hibernation and inaccessible within a sealed area, so he's facing the rest of his life being completely alone (not counting the robot bartender Arthur (Michael Sheen), who's not exactly a substitute for human companionship). More than a year goes by. After agonizing with himself for a very long time, he awakens Aurora Lane, a journalist (Jennifer Lawrence), who then goes through her own cycle of denial/rage/bargaining/acceptance, and of course eventually finds out what he did. Their relationship, which up to that point was starting to go well, predictably breaks down. This is where things might stick, except that the ship's systems are getting gradually worse and clearly something needs to be done. Jumping to the end, the obligatory final action scenes lead them to the ship being restored (with some crucial and unexpected help) and bring the plot to a satisfying, though not completely expected, finish.
Jim's decision to awaken Aurora, which is the critical point of the plot, sparked some real controversy around this film. Is his action morally equivalent to murder? Not really. Or rape? Not exactly. Maybe something like abduction??? Yes, it was a personal violation that prevents Aurora from having the life she planned for. Is Jim's decision inexcusable, as many viewers felt? Is it inexcusable but yet understandable? Probably most people would agree that he'd have been justified in awakening some of the crew, because the lives of all the thousands of people on board are in jeopardy. But that's what he (correctly) tried first and was unable to do. What would the audience reaction have been if the tables were turned such that she awoke first and then brought him out? Are the situations equivalent? I think the film is inviting us to visualize ourselves in their places: Jim knows this step is somehow wrong, but otherwise he's facing decades of utter loneliness, maybe madness, or suicide. What would we do? It's an extraordinary situation that no one in today's world has actually had to deal with. There are echos here of the archetypal Adam and Eve story, but there's no God and no Satan, just impersonal forces represented by the ship and the universe outside.
However, I think that a discussion over the morality of all this must also include the ending. Almost beyond hope the chance comes to at least partially recover. With the ship back to full functionality, they find that it will be possible to use the auto-doc to restart hibernation -- but for just one of them, because the other one has to set it running. Jim offers to do it for Aurora, and now she has a free choice: shall she opt to get her original life plan back again, or to stay with him? So in a nice bit of symmetry, each of them has to confront a moral decision for which there is no completely convincing answer.
The ultimate message, if there is one, seems to be that if you don't get the life you planned, then live the life you get. That's not too bad.
What helps is that the actors do a good job of selling it. Chris Pratt is versatile and likable, and the equally versatile Jennifer Lawrence is excellent; she's got a rare screen presence. She is also not simply playing a 'victim' -- in other words, she has agency of her own. The supporting players (all two of them!) do fine as well, but it's the central pair that counts above all -- and, of course, the ship itself.