In William Golding’s ‘Lord of the Flies’, a shipment of young boys escaping the nightly bombardment of WWII England crash land on a remote uninhabited island and, left to their own devices, attempt to organize rescue and their own society. Reward and punishment is doled out with the knee-jerk brashness that would conceivably come with children-led governance and their laissez-faire island society quickly turns to brutish power struggles and, soon, murder. Neil Burger’s Voyagers borrows Golding’s premise and jettisons it into outer space, stirring in a rudimentary thought experiment about control, pleasure, and autonomy, to mixed results.
The year is 2063 and human-created climate change has finally finished the job of making Earth near uninhabitable. In order to continue the survival of the human race, scientists set their sights on a distant planet with a similar life-sustaining ecosystem to Earth where they believe we might be able to start anew. The only problem is that that planet is 86 years away, and since cryosleep remains squarely in the world of science fiction, those who begin the journey will not be those setting foot upon their final destination.
To solve for this, scientist Richard (Colin Farrell) and his colleagues opt to raise their crew from birth in complete isolation so they will never know what they’re missing out on. Their mission: to begin the journey, man the voyage with tact and principle befitting the adults they will one day become, and reproduce at the appropriate time so the next leg of the journey can be carried on by their offspring. In order to keep the eventually-hormonal teens in check, a chemical known as “the blue” is administered with their daily feedings, an inhibitor that limits pleasure receptors and generally makes them docile and obedient. When Christopher (Tye Sheridan) and Zac (Fionn Whitehead) discover the purpose of the blue, they start pouring their portions down the drain, quickly becoming high on life. Overtaken by the emotional turbulence of teenagerdom, they give into their baser impulses, which quickly becomes problematic and, soon, grossly rapey.
Led by a convincing turn by Sheridan, Voyagers features a diverse selection of young performers including Game of Thrones’ Isaac Hempstead Right, Chanté Adams, Lily-Rose Depp, Archie Madekwe, and Quintessa Swindell though not all are able to break through the mood-stabilized malaise of the blue. Soon Christopher and Zac are at each other’s throats, the former promoting responsibility and the need to band together to complete their assigned mission, the other leaning into his animalistic impulses and signaling the virtues of pleasure. As the crew breaks down into opposing ideological factions, the more obvious cliches (rumpus sex, explosive violence, desire for power) overwhelms Voyager’s more subtle ambitions, i.e. the philosophical questions about the ethics of control.
The script from Burger doesn’t know what to do with it all, rushing through the most fascinating stuff to rush to the predictable showdown that his film telegraphs from a light year away. This wouldn’t be as problematic if the dialogue were a bit sharper and more calculating. Instead, it rifles between exposition dumps and lots of shouting action-verbs or names while running down hallways. It doesn’t help that when we do exit the ship and get a glimpse of the universe, the effects are surprisingly muddy, missing out on the awe-inspiring vistas one would expect from this genre. All in all though, as far as original young adult science-fiction goes you could stand do to a lot worse than Voyagers. The problem is that decency is rarely enough to power a hearty recommendation and the film from Burger is complacent riffing on a familiar chestnut without adding enough new wrinkles to the equation.
CONCLUSION: A teenaged crew of astronauts grows up on a mission to a new Earth in ‘Voyagers’ but the journey can be a rocky one. There’s philosophical intrigue about the ethics of control but it’s left by the wayside to focus on middling teenage angst and murderous power struggles. As a purely commercial vehicle though, ‘Voyagers’ remains a competent vessel for flighty entertainment.
C+
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