Mark Reviews Movies: VOYAGERS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 8, 2021

The mission at the core of Voyagers isn't necessarily doomed, but the crew certainly is. It will take 86 years for a spaceship to reach a newly discovered planet, capable of sustaining life and, perhaps, serving as the last option to save humanity from the climate catastrophe it caused on Earth. It's a guarantee that no one who begins this journey will live to see it to completion. Those initial travelers, though, will lay the groundwork for the generations they will produce along the way. Out of their lives of dull and repetitive routine, the future of human life may prevail.

Writer/director Neil Burger's movie begins with a wealth of deeper questions about the purpose and meaning of life, founded upon what's basically an existential crisis in the form of a plot. Can a person truly live if the entire point of that person's existence is to do some repetitive tasks, reproduce, and, finally, die? In the big picture, such a life has meaning, specifically to preserve humanity, but what immediate, intimate meaning can a person take from that existence?

This is a fascinating and challenging premise, because the questions raised here by Burger might as well apply to every single one of us. In a way, we might even envy the crew of this vessel, knowing that their lives possess a pretty concrete purpose and a very tangible meaning in that big picture of human existence.

They don't see it that way, of course, even though they were bred, born, and raised to serve that greater goal. They're teenagers, too, by the time the mission is underway, and pretty much every teenager or everyone who was a teenager knows that there's a lot of confusion, pressure, and uncertainty to go along with that age. These kids are pacified by way of a daily regimen of a mind-altering chemical, but as we all know, the heart will inevitably long for more. On a more biological level, hormones will do the same.

All of those big questions are addressed here, in a direct way at first but with less concern as Burger's screenplay finds a more noticeable, more simplistic conflict for these characters to tackle. The movie still has some worthwhile queries to confront, mainly about the foundational qualities of human beings as individuals and within a society, but it also seems a bit too willing to resolve all of these problems and thoughts with generic action.

A prologue explains the discovery of the planet, the idea to colonize it, and the breeding and raising of kids who will start the voyage, reproduce on the spaceship, and die before the vessel arrives at its destination, allowing their children and grandchildren to finish the job (This plan raises such a tough ethical and moral dilemmas that Burger just ignores them). Richard (Colin Farrell), a lonely scientist with nothing keeping him on Earth, accompanies the kids on their trek, feeling a parental instinct to guide and protect them.

Ten years into the journey, our central characters are friends Christopher (Tye Sheridan) and Zac (Fionn Whitehead), who discover that the entire crew of child travelers are being drugged into passivity without their knowledge. The two stop drinking the chemical, only to quickly become rebellious and paranoid—Zac more than Christopher. They also start noticing Sela (Lily-Rose Depp), the ship's young medical officer, in a very different way—Zac with a lot more creepiness and aggression than his pal.

Eventually, the teens are left alone on the ship without any adult supervision, any way to communicate with Earth, and anything or anyone to prevent them from acting on their baser impulses. When Christopher is voted as the ship's new commanding officer, Zac's jealousy and sense of entitlement begin a civil war, which starts cold and becomes progressively hotter.

There are other pieces to this story. We get both mysteries—such as the question of whether or not there's an alien crawling around the exterior of the ship or, later, inside the compartments—and secrets—such as a hidden compartment, containing something the crew's future grandkids might need on the planet.

Initially, these don't get in the way of the story's central questions about whether humans are inherently driven by base instinct or are capable of seeing, well, a bigger picture for a greater good (The alien—or "alien"—becomes a tool for Zac to gain followers, by promoting fear and promising protection, so the story becomes a bit of a political parable and basic civics lesson, too). Burger also displays some restraint in terms of visual effects (A few exterior shots of the ship and a relatively early spacewalk are the extent of them) and production design (The ship is plain and sterile), emphasizing that the human drama is what matters in this tale.

Those concerns, as well as the more fundamental questions, do matter for a while. They matter less and less—and, by the time the third act arrives, very little—as the conflict between the competing factions takes center stage. Voyagers begins with some promise, as one set of questions about human existence leads into another series about human nature (They're connected by a more troubling concern: Is humanity even worth saving?). We don't need answers, but we don't need a series of chases to settle things, either.

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