For this week's Movie Minutes, KUNR Entertainment Reviewer Robin Holabird looks at the movie Voyagers, and says it's a thrilling sci-fi adventure that showcases young talent.
Director Neil Burger sends his voyagers on a mission that diverges from his previous young adult hit film Divergent, but nonetheless follows a youthful and tidy path. Featuring an impressive cast of rising stars, the movie Voyagers starts as science fiction and quickly travels into thriller territory that explores issues found in school classics like Lord of the Flies.
Taking on double duty as director and screenwriter, Burger envisions a future world where a special mission zips across the universe bearing a young crew tasked with repopulating themselves, so their grandchildren can settle another planet. Genetically engineered for superior brainpower, the crew members nonetheless remain human - a sad state that devolves when the young bunch realize their abilities to flaunt authority, break rules, have sex, and most importantly, engage in power plays. Any reader and watcher of dystopian society stories like Divergent knows where such discoveries lead.
But rather than get too negative, Writer/Director Burger turns to chase mode, building suspense well as hedonists play cat to the puritans’ mice aboard a spaceship that offers few hiding places. Burger guides a world that looks and moves slickly, with clean production design suiting the sleek looks of crew members who could pass as fashion models.
What else do you expect when Lily Rose-Depp, daughter of Johnny, plays the crew’s chief medical officer? As she recently showed playing a drug addict in the movie Crisis, Rose-Depp inherited looks and talent. Her fellow cast members boast their own sets of impressive credentials including Tye Sheridan from Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One, Fionn Whitehead from Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk and Isaac Hempstead from Game of Thrones. 44-year-old Colin Farrell goes along for the ride, pushing the movie’s ultimate view about the positive value of saving the human species.
Voyagers boasts an “only in theaters” release April 9.
Robin Holabird is KUNR's entertainment reviewer, author and former film commissioner for the Nevada Film Office. You can find her full film review archive here.
