Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Voyagers’ on HBO Max, a High-Concept Spaceship Trip to the Planet of Astronauts-in-Peril Cliches

Now on HBO Max, Voyagers is a plausible-future psychological thriller about people taking a long trip through outer space, a movie concept I haven’t seen in about, oh, three weeks now. Lemme guess: it’s set on a big shiny sanitized Ikea Basics spaceship with long hallways and a room with plants growing in it and a cafeteria and little sleeping compartments and a medical bay, and in these rooms, people deal with problems, like when something breaks on the outside of the ship and forces those people to put on spacesuits and do a dangerous spacewalk in order to fix it. The Astronauts in Peril Movie is a full-blown subgenre these days — and to be honest, it has the potential to yield some compelling ideas, and that’s what writer-director Neil Burger is trying to do here, albeit with mixed results.

VOYAGERS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Long title card made short: Earth dying — need new planet! It’s 2063 — found one! Problem is, it’ll take 86 years for humans to get there, because nobody’s figured out how to hit ludicrous speed yet. Some brains come up with the idea to genetically engineer 30 babies so they don’t have traditional mommies and daddies and are raised in isolation so they won’t miss the sun and other wonderful things while they’re on a spaceship to the Crab Nebula or wherever. On the ship, they’ll reproduce or else, and they’ll die and their grandchildren will check out the new planet and see if all this rigamarole will save humanity. (Or not!) They blast off when the kids are teens, with Richard (Colin Farrell) being the only person supervising them, which seems like not enough people, but it should be a piece of cake since the kids all have been taking some medicated blue juice that keeps them level-headed and squashes their sex drive. Nothing could possibly go wrong with this plan. It’s airtight!

TEN YEARS LATER, the Stepford Astronauts are all bland people wearing navy blue and doing their little jobs diligently and with little humor or joy before going to their little compartments and sleeping on their little sleepy pads without blankets or anything. Richard keeps a Captain’s Log-style diary by speaking into a video camera, a space-travel movie cliche I failed to mention in the first paragraph of this review. Ominous rumbles shake the ship, and Richard insists it’s nothing to be worried about, another space-travel movie cliche I failed to mention in the first paragraph of this review. It takes two months for a message to reach Earth, so they must have Verizon. And then something breaks on the outside of the ship — the COMMS are busted, gotta repair the COMMS — forcing people to put on spacesuits and do a dangerous spacewalk in order to fix it, a space-travel movie cliche I absolutely mentioned in the first paragraph of this review.

There are a few characters among the kids, who are now teenagers. Christopher (Tye Sheridan) is sort of the hero not because he exhibits extraordinary traits but because he gets a lot of screen time. His friend is Zac (Fionn Whitehead) and Sela (Lily-Rose Depp) is the medical officer, and I’m tempted to say these characters are underdeveloped and show no interest beyond their miscellaneous tasks, but I guess that’s what blue juice’ll do to you. Christopher figures out what’s up, so he and Zac stop weezing the juice, and before you know it, what with one thing and another, after a bit and a couple of whiles, the kids are former blank slates run amok, and the whole endeavor ends up like the Greasers vs. the Socs in space.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Lord of the Flies crossed with the following: WALL-E, Ad Astra, Interstellar, Sunshine, Alien, Stowaway, Gravity, The Midnight Sky and The Martian, and I feel like I’m missing some.

Performance Worth Watching: I guess we’ll go with Whitehead, who stands above the rest of the uninspired cast by reaching Tom Felton-in-Harry Potter levels of sneering, cartoonish antagonism. You’ll hate every second of his performance.

Memorable Dialogue: “Murder.” — this is what happens when you try to control everyone, Richard

Sex and Skin: A scene of fairly chaste PG-13 discovery of sexy urges; an imiplied harem situation.

Our Take: And you thought your Kallax shelf was a pain in the ass to put together. This ship has a bunch of ducts that can conveniently accommodate a person or two, AND a hidden compartment full of secret laser rifles! I think Burger got the screenplay from Ikea too, and the instructions included a diagram with a cartoon human frowning and pointing at an original idea with a big X through it. WHAT MAKES US HUMAN, Voyagers asks, as the young people aboard the U.S.S. Görmshippen split into factions that have us wondering if we’re basically good or basically evil, if we’re products of nature or nurture and how that makes us followers or leaders — you know, Philosophy 101 crap like that. And I don’t know if the COMMS ever got fixed, although the directions say you shouldn’t return them to the store, but rather, call an 800 number and a replacement part will be shipped to you within 14 weeks.

Burger helmed Divergent — hey, remember Divergent? — to similarly bland sci-fi realms, where the characters are dull, the situations predictable and its look and ideas recycled from countless other movies. Handcuffed by the script, the cast does what it can; Depp and Sheridan struggle to be more than mannequins with dialogue, navigating annoying plot devices and boilerplate love-story tropes on their way to a dimwitted conclusion. As far as look-ma-we’re-going-to-Jupiter! movies go, Voyagers is slickly directed and goes down smooth like a watery beer, and has at least as much insight into the human condition as a commercial for that beer.

Our Call: SKIP IT. You’ve seen Voyagers far too many times before, and far better. Its microcosmic allegory is thin, and the execution is unconvincing.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

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