VOYAGERS. Starring. Colin Farrell, Tye Sheridan, Isaac Hempstead Wright, Fionn Whitehead, Chante Adams, Lily-Rose Depp, and Viveik Kalra. Directed by Neil Burger. Rated MA15+. Restricted (Strong violence). 108 min.
This American sci-fi thriller tells the story of a group of young men and women who are sent deep into outer space to look for a new home. Under the stresses of what they are doing, and the pressures of their journey, their mission to help themselves and others descends into madness.
Earth is in danger from climate change and drought, and the human race is threatened by extinction. To cope with what lies ahead, men and women have been bred on Earth to control their emotions, behave intelligently, and obey directions that they are given. They are brought together as a single group and given a mission to save mankind. A group of 30 male and female children set off from Earth into outer space. The journey is planned for 86 years and it is the grandchildren of those on board, who are destined to save humankind. The group’s task is to locate a new home for humankind, and they are instructed to colonise the planet that they find.
En route, however, they discover unsettling things about their mission that challenge the worth of what they are doing, and they rebel. They all have been given (and are routinely taking) a drug for impulse control. When they stop the drug, they become motivated to lay aside all that they have been trained to feel and do, and life for everyone on board descends into chaos. In the place of rational urges to explore and discover what is best for humankind, the voyagers on the space-ship revert to the pursuit of power and personal control, they split into group-factions, and they aggressively go searching for liberation: “Who cares about the rules, we can do anything we want” they say, and they are consumed by the desire to satisfy primitive needs and longings. Rationality and emotional restraint, for which they have been bred and trained, give way to fractured reality. Everyone inside the spaceship becomes a risk to everyone else.
Science-fiction films routinely concern themselves with adventures to far-away planets that promise a better life, survival, and the likelihood of better things. By their nature, they pass social or philosophical comment on the human condition, and are typically associated with extraordinary, attention-getting visual effects. The visual effects in this movie are up to speed – its space cinematography is impressive. There is tension in the plot’s unfolding, but the human condition it depicts is depressingly grim.
Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) ultimately looked to the positive, despite its negative moments, and was an excellent example of its genre. Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017) promised a darker and more chaotic environment for the future, but there was hope ahead. This movie zeroes in on unpleasantness and chaos, and until its final moments it stays there. The sci-fi elements of the space travel in Voyagers explore the unfamiliar in the context of the familiar, as most Science Fiction films do, but unlike most movies in the genre, this film locates negativity prematurely. It finds it well before the spaceship has landed, and there is no monster or alien organism, unexpectedly on board. Alien forces lie within themselves to explain what is happening. Bleakness of the human condition warns the viewer not to spend too much time contemplating what might lie ahead. Before a new planet is found, the movie presages a different kind of life that could be far worse than the present one. If this group of voyagers sets up a new society it could be an horrific one, where lust, murder, rape, sexual pleasure, and violence become the new behavioural norms. Everyone looks contented on landing, but viewers beware!
Though it seemingly turns out right at the finish, the world promised by Voyagers is bleak, indecent, and immoral, and the behaviour of this family of space travellers has taken viewers to where many would not wish to go. One feels that the forces that will have to be dealt with for these voyagers to stay with normality after the space ship lands might be well beyond human control. The film engages in science fantasy, rather than science fiction. It fails the criterion of plausibility, and, more importantly, it provides no compelling case for what it means to be human.
Universal Pictures International
Released 8 April 2021
Peter W Sheehan is an Associate of Jesuit Media