Boring and Contrived

Rating: 5/10 (15 January 2017)

The more I think about this movie, the more irritated I get that it wasn't better. Passengers is neither a good sci-fi nor a good romance. There are also way too many plot holes. It's Castaway meets Titanic.
Jim is an engineer who has a budget class ticket to the Homestead Colony planet that will take 120 years to reach. The ship holds 5,000 total passengers, plus a crew, all in suspended animation. After a meteor shower takes some of the systems down, his pod wakes him up prematurely--90 years prematurely.
As a castaway on the ship with only a robot bartender to talk to, he spends the first year trying to fix his pod and then trying to get to the crew, who are unfortunately behind a fortress he can't breach. And he's drinking...a lot of drinking to the point he almost walks outside the ship without a suit to end it all. Then he sees Aurora in her pod and falls for her. He reads her profile and fights his desire to wake her up, knowing it's an eventual death sentence since they're decades away from their destination. Of course, he succumbs, but tells himself and the bartender that he'll tell her that he's the reason she awoke prematurely...eventually.
After the shock of waking up 89 years early, wears off somewhat, Aurora hits it off with Jim. She's a writer who planned to travel to round trip to Homestead and then back to earth, even though she would arrive home some 250 years later. Just as everything seems to be going great, she finds out what Jim did out of loneliness and wants nothing to do with him (understandably).
And that's one problem: Jim was so selfish, he was willing to destroy someone else's life just for his need to have a human companion.
Another problem is why anyone would want a trip that would take 120 years and your family and friends back on earth will be long gone. Aurora's father has died, but you see a video of a going away party her friends gave her, sad in the knowledge they'd never see her again. You don't get much backstory on Jim, except that he wants to be needed for his skill set instead of living in the throwaway society of Earth.
Unlike the audience, Jim seems to be too preoccupied with winning back Aurora to notice that the ship's systems are starting to fail. Suddenly Gus (Laurence Fishburne) appears, who's the ship's engineer and also a victim of a pod malfunction. Almost immediately, however, he is in medical distress because of his early awakening and his sole purpose seems to be to give Jim and Aurora a bracelet that will allow them access to the ship's restricted areas so Jim can fix the problem before the ship explodes.
The first part of the movie is extremely monotonous and it doesn't take much to make Jim start to go off the deep end. You've got to wonder why the robot bartender is activated when it's supposed to be 90 more years before the first people wake up. The rest of the movie stretches both physics and imagination as Jim and Aurora try to fix the ship before it blows up.