It’s not just that divisions form in predictable and dramatically inert ways, the performances universally flat and unengaging as one side rebels against the group’s elected leader, giving into paranoia and opting for violence. There’s a sinking feeling accompanying the realization that, as Christopher and Zac start vying for leadership, Voyagers is becoming Lord of the Flies in space. “We’re just going to die in the end, so why can’t we do what we want? What’s the difference whether we’re good or not?” But Zac acts on his newfound attraction by groping Sela against her will, and then challenges Richard Alling (Colin Farrell), the ship’s lone adult, about why he can’t just do whatever he pleases. There is, at least, a short, giddy window in which Christopher and Zac find themselves awakening to emotional and physical sensation, racing down the hallways, zapping their fingers with electricity, and noticing the same nubile colleague, Sela (Lily-Rose Depp). But the film, which was written and directed by Neil Burger (of The Illusionist, Limitless, and more recently, The Upside), walks a fine line between the philosophical and the frothy, managing with impressive precision to avoid being smart or fun. On the other, it offers all sorts of potential for soapy sci-fi shenanigans when the 30 crew members, a diverse group united in looking like they could at any moment star in a Gap ad, go cold turkey and are all plunged into hyperadolescence at the same time. ![]() ![]() On one hand, the premise of Voyagers is a heady one, asking what gives a life meaning when its course is already set, and that same life has been surrendered in service of a future that won’t be experienced. Then two of their number, Christopher (Tye Sheridan) and Zac (Fionn Whitehead), figure it out and stop taking their daily doses, setting off a chain of events that throws the careful order of life onboard into chaos. The crew is also drugged with a substance they call “blue” that dulls their senses, makes them more biddable, and dampens their sex drives, which becomes relevant as the kids grow up into a bunch of dewy-skinned teenagers living in close quarters with no clue that their state of chaste docility is chemically enforced. In an effort to make this regimented existence more tolerable, the planners behind the mission gestated their intergalactic travelers in a lab and raised them in a sealed facility so they wouldn’t get attached to family or to the dying Earth they’d soon leave behind. Their lives are slated to unfold almost entirely onboard the spaceship Humanitas, on which they’re both the crew and the future parents and grandparents of the eventual settlers. The characters in Voyagers are the middle children of an 86-year colonization mission - born on Earth but never really of it, and also unlikely to survive long enough to see the new planet they’re traveling toward. We usually stays within the indie film field, but we have caved in to include some bigger titles as well.Lily-Rose Depp and Tye Sheridan in Voyagers. Let’s see if we can expect yet another great space travel film in 2015. Like all films in this niche genre, it was highly indebted to the mother of sci-fi space films, 2001: A Space Odyssey. ![]() In 2014 Nolan’s Interstellar was such a project, and although critics were divided, it sure was a great space film that belongs among the ranks of the greatest ever made. Sometimes it can be done with smaller budgets, and by focusing on the human aspects of things, like in Moon, but usually they are gigantic projects. ![]() Making space films, or science fiction films set in space, is by no means an easy task. The movies about Aliens listed here tell us just as much about what it means to a human being on planet earth, as that they are about Aliens and outer space. There are an awful lot of terrible, low-budget space movies out there though, but these are all pretty great. The universe, in all its vastness and mysteriousness, intrigues filmmakers and audiences endlessly.
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