Voyagers (2021)

 Score: 1.5 / 5

In the near future, as the sci-fi tropes go, Earth will become uninhabitable. Scientists discover, in the nick of time, another planet for humans to colonize, and sends a team to set up the initial community. Unfortunately, the trip to this new planet takes 86 years, and so the team of young adults will probably never see it. Rather, the mission is for them to maintain the ship, procreate, and die in space, with the goal that their grandchildren will be the first generation on the new Earth. Not necessarily a groundbreaking concept, it nevertheless opened a wide berth of storytelling opportunities, and in the first 20 minutes or so, I had no idea where this movie was going.

And it chooses one of the more interesting options available to it: Lord of the Flies in space, with attractive young people grappling with their sexual awakenings. The kiddos -- chief of whom are Tye Sheridan, Lily-Rose Depp, and Fionn Whitehead -- begin to fear that some ghostly alien creature is stalking the ship after some mysterious noises rock the ship and a suspicious, violent death rocks their fragile equilibria. Then they learn that "the blue," a drink they are ordered to imbibe daily, is not just a vitamin supplement but a suppressant of hormonal extremes and negative emotional outbursts. As teens will do, they rebel, embracing their adolescence in all its messy manifestations. Breaking free of their routine duties on board, they abuse their food supply, destroy valuable equipment, sacrifice their health, and decide to ignore their mission.

Well, most of them, that is. Colin Farrell -- the only redeeming part of this movie for me -- is the only adult on board, a tender, father-figure who has crucially connected with these young people and who embarked on this voyage knowing full well he'd only live for about half of it. And, bless him, he doesn't make it far at all. His loss affects all the kid-astronauts, who split into factions of idealism and hedonism and, you guessed it, the hedonists are more numerous. The middle of this movie devolves into montages of horny, rageful kiddos embracing their natural sensations as if life itself is a hallucinatory drug; swirling cameras and expressionistic lighting make the trip, well, trippy, and it's easy to get annoyed with all the bad decisions they're all making.

Because everyone is making terrible choices here, even behind the scenes. If this movie had gone full Lord of the Flies, I could have loved it, especially with a nice twist or two like focusing on the intelligent and least-cringey character played by Miss Depp. Instead, there is a sharp dichotomy between the two men, one angry and brutish, the other level-headed and quite boring. Attempts at violence and horror become washed out in sensory overload, and there is a sharper focus on teenage angst and appeal than on anything resembling character development, thematic complexity, or even anything but a rote plot. There's no real horror, other than what kids are capable of doing, and the strong thrust of vindication for their actions from the filmmaker's perspective makes the whole affair dangerously immature.

Colin Farrell should have blasted those kids into space and set up a new world all on his own.