‘Voyagers’ is All Foreplay, No Fornication

Sexy teens in space on a real snooze cruise

Pretty young things discover ugly truths about themselves in Voyagers, a sleek, sexy, and strikingly silly intergalactic journey into humanity’s heart of darkness. It’s like a celestial rumspringa, where boys will be boys and girls go wild. Also, ambitious go-getters can tap their inner tyrannical strongman and turn a close-knit community into sheep. In space, apparently, no one can hear you bleat.


VOYAGERS

★★★ (3/5 stars)

Directed by: Neil Burger

Written by: Neil Burger

Starring:  Tye Sheridan, Lily-Rose Depp, Fionn Whitehead, Colin Farrell

Running time: 108 min


By 2063, global climate change has finally fried Earth, ravaging mankind with disease and starving them else. Luckily, a too-clever group of scientists plans to save civilization by colonizing a newly-discovered virginal planet. the sole catch: it'll take 86 years to urge there. Oops. so that they breed 30 test-tube babies from high-quality genetic donors. They also raise the designer toddlers in a huge spaceship simulator so that they can get won't to living in cramped quarters, never feeling sunlight, and only watching one another. With one exception: Michael (Colin Farrell), a sad-faced scientist charged with raising the tykes.

Michael oversees their scientific education, somehow eliding other topics like history, philosophy, psychology, morality, art, literature, religion, and anything that would give them the faintest insight into an attribute. Because science! Anyway, who needs a humanistic discipline education in space? It’s not like they’re getting to repopulate their species or anything. Oh, wait…

When the time comes, Michael insists on going with them on their one-way ticket to ride, knowing it'll be the maximum amount of a martyr operation for him because it is for them. “I want to guard them,” he says to his colleagues, who seem unfazed at throwing 30 unwitting grade-schoolers to their doom but blanch at his request to hitch them.

How are these kids not worried about their fate? Easy: they’re all secretly doped abreast of “The Blue,” a galactic Gatorade that eliminates concupiscence, decreases pleasure, and makes everyone more docile. What’s the large deal when you’ve never had discretion anyway?

Ten years into their starry-eyed, glassy-eyed, mission, the physically fit, intellectually astute, and emotionally neutered bunch perform their crew duties like good little cogs. By the way, their crew duties seem to involve interfacing with tons of oversized touch-screen monitors and repairing malfunctioning motherboards with shiny gear from their futuristic toolboxes. Also, tending hydroponic plants.

One day, Christopher (Tye Sheridan) discovers that their azure cocktail, a so-called digestive enzyme, is a toxin. “They’re drugging us,” he tells Zach (Fionn Whitehead), a smirking alpha male who thrills to his unshackled life once he stops drinking his meds. And, once they both continue a cleanse, suddenly good-girl medical chief Sela (Lily-Rose Depp) becomes the erotic fixation that neither can stop brooding about.

Christopher and Zach start getting uppity with Michael, sassing and backtalking just like the tweeners they never need to be. Michael gets concerned about the mild insubordination—and then comes his fatal electrocution during a routine repair to repair the communications equipment. Now, with no thanks to contacting Earth and no adult supervision, the barely-legal brood needs to self-regulate. Spoiler alert: they don’t.

Voyagers offer up a series of tantalizing ideas with little or no follow-through. It’s all foreplay and no fornication. If watching it feels frustrating, it’s probably because the entire film may be a dry-hump of unfulfilled potential. How confusing wouldn't it be to suddenly discover feelings? Or be aroused by the people you’ve considered your surrogate siblings? Don’t expect the film to inform you. When fists start flying, the melee is nearly laughingly, thrillingly, primitive, with arms awkwardly akimbo and no technique. That’s an excellent insight. on the other hand, Tye Sheridan lands an ideal jaw-punch and curiosity fades.


Of course, Zach becomes the despot, falling back on go-to moves like seizing the food supply and using fear to regulate his fellow passengers. But why is everyone so gullible? I assumed they were better than that. Sure, they’re all eggheads and don’t have any shrewdness. But they so quickly and glibly allow animalistic desires to dictate all rational behavior. Also, for a bunch of hedonists, they’re pretty tame. No orgies or rapes for this bunch: their rebellion is to take a seat on the dining table and not do the dishes!

Very few characters feel fleshed out, and only a couple are even mentioned by name. How are we to understand the surging effects of their behavior if we don’t understand their intraparty dynamics? Zach exploits everyone’s inner fears—creating a straw-man alien because of the lurking danger inside the ship—which then results in people killing one another a touch too easily. And once they discover a hidden cache of weapons, the movie quickly devolves into a big-budget Laser Tag fight. Too bad. Voyagers take a head-trip premise and turn it into a true snooze cruise.