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.