Voyagers (2021)
Directed by Neil Burger
With the future of the human race at stake, a group of young men and women -- bred for intelligence and obedience -- embark on an expedition to colonize a distant planet. When they uncover disturbing secrets about the mission, they defy their training and begin to explore their most primitive natures. As life on the ship descends into chaos, they soon become consumed by fear, lust and an insatiable hunger for power.
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28 films that influenced Voyagers
What critics say influenced Voyagers
The repression debate soon dissolves into generic chase scenes, including an underwhelming climax reminiscent of Alien (1979), and an impossibly wholesome epilogue.
Indeed, the “Alien” DNA is obvious in “Voyagers,” but Ridley Scott’s 1979 masterpiece is inescapable in modern sci-fi.
Fans of science-fiction will recognize bits from vastly superior properties: The placating drugs of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” the closely guarded memories of Lois Lowry’s “The Giver,” the sequestered paranoia of “Alien.”
When the infighting starts revolving around a potentially mysterious presence, for instance, the feature nudges its audience to think about Alien and Prometheus .
Didn’t anyone in Neil Burger’s Voyagers see Alien (1979)?
Sure, in film, sci-fi is generally split between blockbuster IP exploitation and the po-faced navel-gazing that comes from learning all the wrong lessons from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey .
Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was not built on strong human characters either.
When the picture simply lingers within the spaceship's stylish but restrictive walls and ripples with unease, 2001: A Space Odyssey casts a shadow.
While bearing strong influences from 2001: A Space Odyssey and George Lucas’ THX-1138 , Voyagers isn’t quite as brainy as either of those films, and certainly isn’t original enough to be called smart.
The first third of “Voyagers” takes visual cues from “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
Insulating these folks from Earth life means nobody’s seen “2001: A Space Odyssey” or any of the other films to use that emergency as the inciting incident.
Of the myriad high-cheekboned Calvin Klein models, the main trio consists of the blandly heroic Christopher (Tye Sheridan, “Ready Player One”), a manically glossy-eyed Zac (Fionn Whitehead, “Dunkirk”) and the dour Sela (Johnny Depp’s daughter, Lily-Rose Depp, who channels dad’s “Cry-Baby” sullenness here).
Voyagers brings to mind everything from the occasionally watchable Hunger Games franchise to Chris Pratt gaslighting Jennifer Lawrence into procreating an entire human race in the stupendously misguided and heroically awful Passengers .
For the first half-hour or so, “Voyagers” appears to be setting itself up as a film that suggests what might have resulted if Harmony Korine had inexplicably been given the gig of directing the notoriously tasteless and idiotic sci-fi dud “Passengers”—the one where futuristic dudebro Chris Pratt technically murders Jennifer Lawrence because he has the hots for her, though she eventually falls in love with him despite that little hiccup.
Just when you thought you could not watch one more film of this kind, here is “Voyagers,” a title that sounds enough like “Passengers” (2016) to put you off you spaceship-grown peas and carrots.
Like “Passengers” (2016) and Clare Denis’ alluring jump into space, “High Life” (2019), “Voyagers” is more about the sexual and personality play among those onboard as opposed to the quest at hand.
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The film occasionally brings to mind Claire Denis’s spacebound psychosexual drama High Life , in which a group of convicts are stuck on a spaceship and forced to contemplate matters of existence.
The premise of placing groups of people inside spaceships and seeing what happens to them under extreme circumstances has cropped up recently, and successfully, in the Swedish-Danish film Aniara and A24’s French-German production, High Life , both released in 2018.
Like “Passengers” (2016) and Clare Denis’ alluring jump into space, “High Life” (2019), “Voyagers” is more about the sexual and personality play among those onboard as opposed to the quest at hand.
That said, it does borrow heavily from quite a few other sources, with shades of “Lord of the Flies,” “The Giver,” “Ender’s Game,” “Euphoria” and any number of space madness films.
While playing into fluoride conspiracy theories, it’s in keeping with elements of Huxley’s Brave New World and Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau, where technological hubris and desperation create a whole new level of dysfunction (and utilizing similar teen parameters like Ender’s Game , 2013).
When it comes to warring youths, Lord of the Flies , The Hunger Games and The Maze Runner all get a nod.
It was not as memorable or as commercially successful as The Hunger Games (2012).
As the alpha villain, Whitehead ( Dunkirk ) leaves as much of an impression here as Tim Roth does in Rob Roy (1995), in part because everyone else is so dutifully restrained.
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Make-out sessions (PG-13 ones, anyway) ramp up in every available corner, the guys start engaging in Fight Club-like wrestling matches — and soon a power struggle arises between the sweet-natured kid everyone elected the new skipper (Ready Player One’s Tye Sheridan) and a dark-eyed sociopath (Dunkirk’s Fionn Whitehead) who, for uncertain reasons, manages to get half the crew to follow him.
Soon, everyone is off “the blue,” and things get all “Fight Club” and then, yep, “Lord of the Flies.”
Twenty-five years ago, Paul Verhoeven made “Starship Troopers” (1997), and whatever you thought of that self-consciously over-the-top high-cheese parable of pinup actors battling giant bugs, there’s no denying it packed a wallop that was very late ’90s — a revel in teen-idol decadence fused with rollicking tech-boom excess.