Long, slow romance with cool sci-fi bits

Rating: 4/10 (12 January 2020)

In the future some spaceship owned by a corporation is transporting thousands of people in hibernation to a colony planet. Even though it has some fancy shield to protect it during a meteor shower it is hit by a large meteor. The ship can also fix itself, which it does, but there some one item left it can't fix. Suddenly one guy named Jim is awoken from hibernation. There is no else awake not even crew. The whole ship is automated, the AIs are of no help. There are plenty of little robots cleaning things. Jim sends a message to headquarters which is going to take several decades to arrive. He learns that they are 90 years away from their destination and he cannot put himself into hibernation. For some reason Jim desperately tries to break in the cockpit but to no avail. He makes use of the facilities on the ship which include everything someone could want. Except that it's arranged by social classes. He's a mechanic so he's lower class and gets a small cabin and lousy food. But the spacewalks are fun. One day he discovers an open bar and a bartender, but it's a robot as well. But at least he can have conversations with it. After a year he goes looking at the hibernation pods and finds a pretty girl. It occurs to him to maybe wake her up. But he's undecided and chats with the robot/bartender named Arthur about it.
Then one day he decides to wake the girl up pretending it's another ship malfunction. She's pretty antisocial and doesn't care much about him. She too tries to break into the cockpit for no good reason after getting frustrated with the unhelpful AI. But she's upper class so she has access to better food/facilities. Little by little she warms up to Jim and they go on dates and try to have fun. On the day he wants to give her a ring, Arthur decides to spill the beans and tell the girl that Jim woke her on purpose. She flips out of course realizing that it's a death sentence and basically wants nothing to do with him.
Over time things start to malfunction aboard the ship, starting with the little cleaning robots. Then suddenly Jim and the girl run into another guy, he's the captain. Now things on the ship start breaking down real fast. The captain, too, is sick. The healing pods can do nothing for him; he's got massive multi-organ failure and has a few hours to live. In the last couple of seconds he tells them that they have to find out what is wrong with the ship and fix it.
Somehow they quickly realize it's something near the fusion core and sure enough the meteorite broke through the walls. Things now are seriously overheating and the venting system isn't working so Jim realizes he has to do a spacewalk outside to fix the vent doors while the girl pulls the handle to vent the core. Of course things don't go smoothly and we learn whether they manage to save the ship and all people on board.
I'm telling it as if it were an action sci-fi film, but Passengers isn't. The focus here is the on/off romance and drama between the two. The romance is alright I guess. Not sure if people who like romance are annoyed as much by the bits of action as much as action people are by the romance. The setting was ideal for horror action sci-fi instead of romance and drama. The premise is pretty good, of course nothing new. The visuals too are cool, both the bits of cosmos and the fancy modern interior design of the spaceship. The problem for me was the excessive length of the movie and that during most of it, nothing is really at stake. No effort is made to get us to care about the fate of the 5000 passengers. The rest is pretty predictable, so it's not like the movie surprises at any point. Not sure why Tyldum got involved in this. There's nothing in the script that is remotely interesting or that has potential for a director to leave his mark. If anything it's Pratt who makes this dull movie work.