After a year, as one character explains, Jim becomes a desperate drowning man willing to take someone down with him. Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence) is a journalist minding her own business in her own sleep pod when a desperate and suicidal Jim, not without some soul-searching, decides to condemn her to his own fate. He wakes her, lies to her about it being a malfunction, watches her panic over her desperate predicament, and then wins her heart.

And it is at this point where a number of film critics flipped out and doomed "Passengers" to a horrific and unfair 30% score at Rotten Tomatoes.

The Guardian sums the reactions up nicely:
This is absurdly unfair, especially because the movie agrees with these "triggered" critics.

Jim's act is not only presented as creepy and hideously immoral, but by committing it he is turned into a pathetic character. The story does not use Jim waking Aurora as a meet-cute or plot device, and "Passengers" is not a romantic comedy. Yes, it is a big, Hollywood blockbuster, but one that is "about" and takes very seriously the moral and ethical dilemma presented by Jim's unspeakable decision.

Yes, what Jim does is immoral, but the movie is not. There is nothing wrong with exploring unethical behavior, and in doing so, you don't have to turn the perpetrator into a mustache-twirling villain. Hollywood does this all the time with the truly evil, like terrorists and child molesters, and all the same critical class condemning "Passengers" praise this as sophisticated nuance. Moreover, at the end -- how do I put this without giving anything away? -- what happens to Jim, is fitting and just. He pays for his crime.

Maybe what's really irking these left-wing critics is the fact that Jim is a rugged, masculine working class fella who cuts the urbane, Manhattan writer down to size a notch?

Passengers, aka Grab 'Em By the Pussy: The Movie