Previously, director/writer Neil Burger tackled a teen-dystopia sci-fi affair with 2014’s Divergent, a Hunger Games knockoff that didn’t do much for the YA genre. With Voyagers, Burger takes another stab at the genre, this time with a bunch of cloned teenagers on a spaceship that’s on course for an uninhabitable planet, ready to be populated by their future children and grandchildren. It’s also revealed that the teens have been given some medication that makes their personalities more docile and reduces their sex drive. When the two male protagonists stop taking the drug, chaos starts to ensue on the ship. It may seem like a decent enough premise, but it devolves into ‘Lord of the Flies in Space’ with elements of High-Life and Passengers thrown in for good measure.
The plot is very much a mishmash of ideas and concepts that we’ve seen done before and have been done better, but that’s not to say that it still can’t be enjoyed on its own. Indeed, it is a watchable film, and Berger can make a movie palatable and even enjoyable for the casual viewer (The Illusionist and Limitless are perfect examples of this). Still, they aren’t going to leave any lasting impact whatsoever, and Voyagers is precisely that. The subject matter of teens discovering hormonal urges of violence and sex should feel more hard-edged and adult than it is, but Voyagers comes across as relatively tame in places.
The occasional sluggish pacing and a dull lead performance from Tye Sheridan certainly don’t help matters. Still, the production design is effective, and some of the supporting performers work efficiently well. Fionn Whitehead perfectly nails the incredibly violent and hormonal sleazeball causing chaos, while Lily-Rose Depp delivers a quietly nuanced performance as the love interest that’s trying to keep everything together.
Despite having some sound ideas at its core as well as some decent performances, Voyagers is a pretty safe, by-the-numbers film that delivers what you’d expect and nothing more. It’s the storytelling equivalent of a software update: it’s not an entirely original thing, it takes a while to install and once finished, you’d hardly notice any difference whatsoever.
