Spaceship version of Lord of the Flies a squandered opportunity
The film tacks on an ending that the phrase ‘‘total cop-out’’ seems sadly inadequate for.
Voyagers (R13, 108 mins) Directed by Neil Burger Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★
About five years back, a New York subway car door refused to open for me. It can’t have lasted more than half-a-minute. But on a stinking hot August day, anxious to get the hell out from under the earth and preferably be somewhere air-conditioned and liquor licensed, those 30 seconds or so were enough to set my mind to whirling.
And in my waking dream, I imagined a world in which the door never opened and the carriage simply tore off down the line again, away from the station and deep into the bowels of the NYC transit system, onto some mythical loop line.
With the drivers dead in their cab, but the power still flowing through the rails, spared from an unknown cataclysm above, our train would rattle around its track in the hot darkness forever, while we, the living entombed, fell into warfare between the carriages, fighting for every drop of condensation and morsel of human flesh until there was no-one left alive to tell our tale.
A few moments later, the doors opened and I walked out into the night, happy I’d just come up with some proletarian and blood-soaked variant of Snowpiercer, but vowing to maybe go a bit easier on the tequila that night.
A few months later, when I’d actually written most of a first draft, Train to Busan came out and I figured my story was dead in the water forever.
But, no-one’s claiming the whole Lord of the Flies-meets-technology idea isn’t a good one. The hellaciously good and apparently timeless Cube (1997) is still a worthwhile watch, with only some shonky dialogue and acting really letting the side down, and the Netflix-available The Platform takes the concept to superb heights, with an explicit class-war subtext complementing the usual ‘‘what happens when imprisoned people are left to revert to their true nature?’’ storyline.
Voyagers arrives – we hope – near the very end of this current cultural void. The cinema owners of North America are just beginning to think about the possibility of firing up the popcorn maker again and China is apparently open for business.
Which, I think, only makes the disappointment even more acute; that an idea so robust and blazing with potential as ‘‘It’s Lord of the Flies. But on a spaceship!’’ should be squandered on such a pedestrian, anaemic and predictable final product.
An environmental catastrophe – still the laziest trope in all fiction, by a lazy mile – has made Earth a no-longer-viable option. And so a breeding programme has produced a promised race of uber-mensch (and, err, womensch) who will travel for 80 years to colonise a distant planet. Or, at least, their grandchildren will. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, perhaps the young geniuses, bred to solve problems, might cotton on to the fact that the blue dye in their drinking water is actually a sedative, designed to keep them compliant and unexcitable.
And then, when they have worked out how to remove it, they might suddenly rise up against Colin Farrell – improbably, the ‘‘grown-up in charge’’ here – and, for no clearly explained reason, split into two factions, with one wanting only to take charge and murder the other.
Voyagers brings to mind everything from the occasionally watchable Hunger Games franchise to Chris Pratt gaslighting Jennifer Lawrence into procreating an entire human race in the stupendously misguided and heroically awful Passengers.
Rather than really interrogate any possibility that human nature is a nuanced and unpredictable thing, the film all too soon settles into a steady rhythm of fight, flight and jump scare, before tacking on an ending that the phrase ‘‘total cop-out’’ seems sadly inadequate for.
The poster and trailer seem to be cynically promising brutality and sexuality in censor-scaring quantities, when the reality is even that R13 rating is barely justified. Lip service is paid to ‘‘fake news’’ and cultism, but it is soon forgotten.
With a bolder script and some less-expected choices in the design and detail, Voyagers might have been an intriguing film. But it settles instead for looking and sounding like every young-adult sci-fi of the past decade or more, with interchangeable characters spitting low-level banalities at each other within the exact same sterile white walls of every movie spaceship ever.
These people are supposed to be the future of all humanity. Would a little art be too much to ask? And maybe a puppy?