The setup for Passengers is deceptively simple. The film takes place aboard the Avalon , a colossal spaceship transporting over 5,000 passengers and crew in hibernation pods to a colony planet known as Homestead II. The journey is slated to take 120 years. The passengers are asleep, destined to wake up only four months before arrival.

On the starship Avalon , transporting 5,000 colonists to a distant planet, a malfunction causes passenger Jim Preston (Pratt) to wake from hypersleep 90 years too early. After a year of utter solitude with only a robot bartender (Michael Sheen) for company, he faces an impossible choice: live and die alone, or wake up a beautiful writer, Aurora Lane (Lawrence).

She stays. They live out their lives on the Avalon . They turn the giant observation deck into a garden. They build a house among the stars. When the remaining 5,000 colonists wake up 88 years later, they find a forest growing inside the ship, and a voice recording left by Aurora, who lived to be an old woman.