Voyagers (2021)

 

In the mid 21st Century, Earth is ravaged by climate-change.  Fortunately, astrophysicists have discovered a human-habitable planet.  Plans are made to send a scouting mission, but as it will take the craft 86 years to reach its destination, this will need to be a multi-generational trip.

Because of this, and to conserve resources on the flight, the mission planners resolve to use children born from IVF and raised in isolation from the world, in a confined location very similar to the vessel on which they will spend the rest of their lives.  The mission itself will be launched while they are still pre-teens, with a single adult to guide them.

Future generations will be performed when then crew turn 24, then again when those offspring reach that age, so that the grandkids of the original crew reach their destination.

"What about sexual reproduction, and the sex drive in general?" you may ask; as the mission planners do.  They decide to include a chemical in the daily diet that will suppress the sex drive - and many emotional responses - to keep the grew placid and cooperative.

Yeah, that goes about as well as you might expect.

So, the basic concept for Voyagers is pretty much "Lord of the Flies in space".  Honestly, it's not a bad elevator pitch.  Unfortunately, it seems like the script has no real ideas outside of that.  Other than the setting and the inclusion of female characters as well as male, it largely follows the outline of the book.  Once the crew ween themselves off the chemical that is keeping them docile, conflict quickly follows.  Even the creation of an imaginary "beast" in the novel - which drives much of the aggression there - is paralleled in the film, with paranoid fears of an "alien" menace driving much of the intra-drew antagonism.

The film does have a reasonably talented young cast, who work hard to make the material engaging.  However, they're definitely hampered in this by the fact that the script gives them little to work with.  There are no surprises here, no nuances.  The good/bad divide is very blatant and stark, and rather heavy-handed.  A shame, I think, since the 'bad guys' resentment of being secretly dosed with chemicals is definitely something I can empathise with, and it would have been interesting to see them get a more sympathetic treatment.

Another aspect that lacks nuance is the film's use of symbolic montages to represent the awakening of emotion and sexual desire. They lack any subtlety, to the point that they may as well have shown a bunch of pistons pounding up and down and called it a day.  This is particularly frustrating when they show that they can depict this a lot more naturalistically and effectively through mimicking the characters' actual gazes.  The lingering camera on the central female character's arm, or her neck and the curve of her jaw, is structurally much less intrusive, and it even avoids being overtly male-gazey, given it does not focus on breast or buttock.

A decent concept, decently acted, but let down by the script and some of the imagery.