film reel image

film reel image

Thursday, November 4, 2021

Voyagers 2021 * * * Stars

LONG DISTANCED VOYAGER

Science fiction films tend to be more of the same and well, that's what I went into thinking when I was about to watch Voyagers. Thankfully I was pleasantly surprised. 2021's Voyagers breaks the mold or at least it intends to. It's knife-edge, intense, and gets all it can out of its $29 million dollar budget. It's been thirty years but we can now actually call a flick Lord of the Sci-Flies

So yeah, Voyagers blurs the lines of its PG-13 rating. There's some bloody images and nubile themes that may be a little too much for your normal budding youth. Coming from the enthusiastic mind of director Neil Burger (Divergent, Limitless), Voyagers has a pristine look and can actually wow you on the big screen (sadly it might be too late for that). With cinematographer Enrique Chediak on board and game, Voyagers is 2001-ish with some serious, Steadicam bliss. 

Taking place in the year 2063 and containing adequate set designs that are futuristic enough, Voyagers is the space-age version of "inmates running the asylum" (or not running, just rebelling). It's about a group of teenagers sent on a spacecraft mission to colonize a planet because the living conditions on Earth just ain't cutting it. 

Voyagers at a sufficient running time of 108 minutes, is basically cut from original cloth unless you count the 1990 film mentioned earlier (see first paragraph). Edited cleanly, stealth in its violence, and cast almost perfectly (Tye Sheridan, Lily-Rose Depp, and Colin Farrell are really good here), Voyagers only suffers from a pat and speedy ending that sort of wraps everything up in a nice neat bow. Whatev. It's about the journey here or should I say, the journey of 86 years from our planet. Voyagers revels in cinematic conflict as its characters let natural selection and vacuumed Darwinism weed itself out. Good peregrination. 

Written by Jesse Burleson

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