I remember that there was initially a meteor strike, but It does not come clear to me why this, above all things, would cause a hibernation pod to malfunction.
No debris or similar event is not seen anywhere near the pods.
Is there any explanation why Jim's pod would fail?
Mechanical failure caused a malfunction in Jim's pod and woke him up.
From wikipedia,
The Avalon, a sleeper ship transporting 5,000 colonists and 258 crew members in hibernation pods, is on course to the planet Homestead II, a journey taking 120 years. Thirty years into its journey, the ship passes through an asteroid field, leading to a collision that causes a malfunction. The malfunction awakens one passenger, mechanical engineer Jim Preston, 90 years too early.
Another POV I found from Quora,
As I understood it from the end of the movie, the opening scene represented an encounter with an asteroid field that overwhelmed it's defensive capabilities. The “deflector dish/asteroid destroyer” device could keep up with the smaller pieces, but was unable to stop a large piece from penetrating into the ship. This large asteroid, though primarily destroyed, had some smaller pieces slam into and through the Avalon, and damaged the reactor control computer. Without anyway to repair it's damaged reactor control computer, the ship began to use computer resources from other less necessary systems, beginning with the computer control of Chris Pratt’s sleep chamber.
While what Vishwa said is most likely correct, i prefer to think of it as Jim being woke up because he is:
his main motivation is fixing things
Jim: people don't fix things there, they just buy a new one.
he actually wakes up at full health
but instead of fixing the problem, he spends an entire year playing video games and growing a beard until he finally sparks interest with a lady and investing all his skill set in waking her up.
Later another character wakes up - this time most likely due to malfunction, but maybe also as a further escalation step because Jim obviously isn't taking any hints. At this point he gets some clear goals and quickly achieves the goal by throwing a hail mary in space.
Unfortunately, the ship would have had multiple means (Arthur, Displays, Announcements, etc.) to give him clear instructions earlier on. So chances are that he indeed woke up by a malfunction as well.
