Perhaps the most satisfying sci-fi of the year

Rating: 10/10 (16 September 2017)

I'll briefly begin with a cursory summary of the plot, then delve into what makes this an awesome movie.
Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence are both travelling on a ship headed to a distant colony. All the passengers and crew are in cryopods; a type of suspended animation so that they arrive at their destination still at the age they were when they left Earth.
While the system is meant to be self-correcting, and the crew is supposed to awaken if anything malfunctions, only the Chris Pratt's pod opens; presumably due to a malfunction. He is alone on the ship, in the sense that everyone else is still "sleeping". Unless he wakes up another passenger, he will live the rest of his life without any company, like a prisoner in solitary confinement.
After some soul searching, he decides to wake up a passenger, Jennifer Lawrence. While he is poor, and in third class, she's in first class. She took the trip to write a book about the experience. He took it as an opportunity for a new life, much like many of the poor Irish passengers on the Titanic in steerage.
Although they hit it off after a rocky start, she eventually learns her pod did not open due to a malfunction; he woke her up. In effect, he has robbed her of her life, at least the life she wanted on the distant planet, where she'd write a book on her travels.
Their feud is interrupted by more malfunctions all over the ship. That's all I will reveal. Best you see the remainder yourself.
What's good about the film? Not to be cavalier and flippant, but really everything. Besides being excellent actors, Pratt and Lawrence have good chemistry in the movie; we buy into their romance. Unlike a "heavy mental" over-the-top movie like Interplanetary, Passengers is a romping good time, full of action, thrills, and suspense. It doesn't try to impress us with cutting edge ideas such as Arrival.
Unlike Arrival or Interplanetary, Passengers is a movie I could easily watch a second or third time. It's a great movie experience. I found very little I could fault with the movie; it was a clever, tension-packed plot, well scripted, well acted, and the pace didn't lag. While some people invariably complain about the middle of movies going too slow, this one kept our attention throughout. After all, we know something.... something, is wrong aboard the ship, but at first our two protagonists are able to shrug it off. They are minor inconveniences.
Passengers is an example of sci-fi done right. Do we really want science fiction that does its best to confound us with a plot so overly complicated and full of physics quandaries that we can't make heads or tails of some scenes? I know they were trying to out-do 2001: A Space Odyssey, but thanks, no thanks. Arrival was similarly irritating in the sense that I just didn't buy into the plot.
Passengers has a rock solid plot, easy to grasp, and entertaining to watch unfold.