Do you want to see Lord of the Flies in space?  Because this is Lord of the Flies in space.

I was trying to sell this to people as “Passengers with teenagers.  Blue Lagoon meets Lord of the Flies meets Brave New World in space!”  And I was partially right.  I mean sure, the premise of a ridiculously long space flight journey is Passengers all over, although here our teen-travellers are drugged not in stasis.  Arguably they still “wake up.”  But the strongest and most dominant of vibes here are Lord Of The Flies.

I passionately love the book of LotF – never to be confused with LotR (Lord of the Rings – for which I have zero love at all).  And I’ve never really enjoyed either of the major film adaptations.  But Voyagers is, in places, nearly a beat-for-beat version of LotFlies.  Just a little more high-tech and spaceship.

There’s two boys battling for leadership supremacy.  There’s a problem with continued communication – just the signal fire is a comms antenna.  There’s the unsettling insinuation that “the beast” is running rampant on their spaceship-island and they need to be able to kill it.  The beast in this case is a possible “alien” rather than a decomposing parachutist.  They re-enact so many scenes. I found myself chanting under my breath “kill the pig, cut her throat, bash her in” and later “sucks to your asss-ma” when everyone turns on the obvious Piggy stand in.

This film does something I enjoy very much, which is pure visual emotive montages.  Random footage of plants or blood or growth or fireworks.  It’s a technique I really enjoy – moving to visuals for pure emotion and insinuation.  I remember them doing it a lot in Lucy (2014) and I loved it there too.  This film has a lot of interesting cut techniques – sometimes fast cut trailers then present as boring films – but this film is cut with interesting jumps and plenty of closeups.

The acting is kind of flat for a lot of it, but that does reflect the way these space-teens had been raised.  It didn’t lean nearly as darkly into the horror of the possible alien as I’d hoped, staying fairly breezy in terms of being an intense teen-drama.  It also didn’t get surreally beautiful.

But for a space-based re-do of Lord of the Flies, which I am into, it did a pretty good job.

J* gives it 4 stars.

PS: If you google “is Voyagers Lord of The Flies in space?” you’ll get plenty of confirmation on this point.