Upon encountering the movie poster for Voyagers — entwined bodies, sci-fi lighting — I mistakenly believed it to be a rerelease of Passengers, the 2016 space romance starring Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt. That picture, in which interstellar travelers commit ethical offenses before falling into the sack, considered whether loneliness permits the knowing destruction of someone else’s suspended-animation chamber. Voyagers, despite more similarities than an unrelated film should decently possess, is not, in fact, the same movie. If such a thing is possible, it is even less convincing, insightful, and nuanced.
Written and directed by Neil Burger (The Illusionist, Divergent), Voyagers treads familiar ground in its plot-commencing exposition. Earth, a globally warmed husk of its former self, can no longer support life on a large scale. Fearing human extinction, scientists prepare for a scouting mission to a planet that appears to contain oxygen and water. The twist? Humanity’s new home is an inconvenient 86 years away. In order to ensure the survival of the species, the probing vessel will be staffed with adolescents, and their grandchildren will inherit the new world.
That this arrangement turns out to be the worst public policy decision since COVID-19 lockdowns will come as no surprise to viewers who have spent time around American teenagers. Armed with what is presumably one hell of an instruction manual, the youngsters set off into space under the nominal command of scientist Richard Alling (Colin Farrell). When Richard dies in a spacewalk gone wrong, the teenagers are left to fend for themselves in a closed society that quickly comes to resemble Lord of the Flies. The cause of this descent into tribalism is the group’s resolve to stop taking “the blue,” a libido-dampening concoction dispensed with the morning milk and cornflakes. Soon enough, a crew that has been trained to grow babies in test tubes begins attempting to produce them the old-fashioned way, with all the rivalries and jealousies that juvenile attachments entail.
Among the more intriguing aspects of Voyagers is the fact that the mission’s young astronauts have been raised in total isolation to help them live and die in an aluminum hull. Alone on the ship, having cast aside their emotional suppressants, the teenagers watch Richard’s home videos and gawk at unregulated human behavior. Feeling normal urges for the first time, they have no capacity to handle them and are initially tentative before giving in to their newly discovered lust and rage. This progression, though handled with all the subtlety of an episode of The Bachelor, at least raises some interesting questions, if for no other reason than that they challenge contemporary orthodoxies of sexual decorum and consent. What are we to make, for example, of carnal aggression in adolescents who have never heard of rape? To what extent, moreover, does virtue even exist in the absence of cultural guideposts or any kind of shared social history?
Leading the movie in its exploration of such matters is a trio of stars chosen more for androgynous beauty than for any acting range or skill. Fionn Whitehead (Dunkirk) is Zac, an instigator par excellence who hopes to overthrow the ship’s fledgling democracy and institute a new era of sex and snacking. (The vessel’s food supply figures heavily in the film’s various conflicts.) Tye Sheridan (Ready Player One) is Christopher, the duly elected expedition leader who represents fidelity to the mission and the reclamation of what might be called traditional values. Tugged between the two boys is Lily-Rose Depp (The King), whose character, Sela, serves as both the ship’s doctor and the object of competing sexual ethics. For Zac, physical intimacy is merely one more good to be contested. For Christopher, old-world gallantry is the rule, but not because of any well-considered principle. He simply intuits that men should act thus.
If this struggle between moral opposites feels overly reductive at times, it is because Burger has done next to nothing to move his characters beyond one-dimensionality. Though both Zac and Christopher cease taking the blue early in the movie, only Zac behaves villainously as a result. Christopher, a fundamentally nice boy, experiences heightened emotions but leaves no victims in his wake. The reason for this dichotomy is as straightforward as the Cain and Abel story in the book of Genesis: Zac is evil, while Christopher is good. Exacerbating this crudeness is the propensity of the film’s bit players to utter lines such as “maybe this is what they’re really like” and “maybe this is our true nature.” How is any movie supposed to achieve thematic complexity when the chorus won’t stop narrating the subtext?
Unsurprisingly, Voyagers makes other missteps to go with its philosophical shallowness. Farrell, whose best work has tended to involve gunplay and belligerence, is miscast here as a mournful man of science. An alien subplot introduced early in the film goes nowhere and is so clearly a red herring that the screenplay ought to have credited Agatha Christie. The picture’s most intractable problem, however, may be that the work of exploring ship-bound tedium has already been done. The particular cocktail of boredom, romance, and hostility served up by Passengers was not especially flavorsome, but moviegoers nonetheless drank it up. Voyagers, cruising along in that film’s $300 million shadow, has little of substance to add.
One wonders, in fact, whether Burger would have been better off embracing his movie’s obvious potential as pro-vaccination agitprop, a strategy that might have done some good as well as sanding down his characters’ brittle edges. This is, after all, a film that intends to convey a message. In 2021, what could be more useful than a reminder that medicine is made to be taken?
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
