The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D+
Rarely does a movie manage to bore me within the first minute, but Voyagers pulled it off nicely by opening with exposition stating that Earth has become uninhabitable and humans need to find another planet that can serve as our home. Brilliant, I’ve never heard that one before. This has become the modern science fiction equivalent of an 80s horror movie starting with a bunch of horny teenagers going to a secluded location to party, except that setup almost always had some entertainment value. I’m fucking tired of this. There are other story devices that can be used to get people onto a spaceship. Fucking use them.
So Earth is doomed (as usual), so mankind loads a bunch of kids on a journey to a distant planet to rebuild society. With the trip lasting 80-something years and only one adult aboard the ship (because that’s a good idea), the kids are drugged via their daily drinks to suppress their emotions and hormones and make the trip uneventful. Strictly from a managerial perspective, that’s not a bad idea. What is a bad idea is to keep that information available in the ship’s computer system for the kids to discover when they get older. They do just that, stop taking the drug and mild chaos ensues.
Interestingly (in a mind-numbing sort of way), Voyagers actually turns out to be less of a ripoff of Interstellar (and a hundred other recent science fiction films) and is actually a ripoff of Lord of the Flies. Now, I looked through a bunch of review headlines about this movie and pretty much all of them made the Flies comparison. To his credit, writer/director Neil Burger has acknowledged that Voyagers is Lord of the Flies in space. However, when I read that, I assumed that he meant it in a broader thematic sense. I didn’t think that this movie would actually be a point-by-point recreation of the plot of Flies in a spaceship. How the fuck did William Golding not receive a credit for this film? No “based on the novel by….” or “inspired by the novel by….” or even “special thanks to….”? That guy’s estate needs to sue somebody because this is frigging ridiculous. If Neil Burger did anything but pull up the text of Lord of the Flies, hit ctrl+f, and replace all instances of “island” and “beast” with “ship” and “alien,” then he wasted a lot of time. If I was an English teacher and a kid thought he was being clever by connecting Voyagers with Lord of the Flies, I would hand the kid a shovel and personally escort him to begin his career as a ditch digger.
Since I read Lord of the Flies in high school, and must have been sober that day because I remember it, I knew every plot point of Voyagers well in advance. With that level of predictability, the characters and performances had better be damn good. Alas, they aren’t, though I will give points to spot-on casting when they chose Tye Sheridan and Lily-Rose Depp (yes, Johnny’s daughter) to play emotionless pieces of wood masquerading as humans. In fact, the vast majority of the characters remain largely stoic and disinterested even after refusing to take the drug, which makes for quite a coma-inducing group of people to watch for two hours. When you combine an incredibly predictable plot with protagonists that are almost literally sleepwalking through the film, you are left with little but a growing urge to take a nap.
There are only two characters that seem to have a particularly intense reaction to the lack of medication, and they add some spark to the proceedings. The villain, played by Fionn Whitehead, is almost absurdly unconvincing as a threat, but he does immediately become a sexual predator when his hormones return to normal levels. I wouldn’t encourage anything that would make this movie longer, but this guy goes from zero to a hundred in about five fucking seconds. My favorite, though, would be the girl (played by Quintessa Swindell) that immediately starts riding every dick she can find once she’s off her meds. Don’t worry, it’s PG-13, so it still isn’t that entertaining. But the fact that I’m supposed to take it seriously is damn funny.
I put off reviewing this for a week because I was hoping to come up with something interesting to say about it, but I’ve got nothing. Voyagers is a lazy, boring ripoff of one famous novel and about a thousand science fiction films that came before it. The fact that the filmmaker acknowledges that it is a ripoff may make it more honest, but it sure as hell doesn’t make it more entertaining. If you have never read (or seen) Lord of the Flies, then maybe there will be something here for you. For everyone that passed high school English, Voyagers isn’t full of sound and fury, and still signifies nothing.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyagers_(film)#/media/File:Voyagers.jpg
