voyager 227 what movie

Everything We Know About Voyagers, The Carl Sagan Movie Starring Andrew Garfield

Carl Sagan, for those who may not know, was an astronomer and charismatic cosmologist who came into the public eye in 1980 with the broadcast of his PBS series "Cosmos: A Personal Voyage." That show, in addition to Sagan's many novels, books, and lectures, helped popularize astral science, bringing casual conversations about space to new heights. 

Sagan's popularity is understandable. He was affable and well-spoken, and he talked about fun scientific concepts like the existence of UFOs, and the actual, mathematical odds that an alien civilization might someday visit Earth; given the size of the universe, Sagan calculated that there are at least a million Earth-like civilizations out there somewhere. The film "Contact" is based on his novel. Sagan was also a major advocate for marijuana use, and was rather spiritual, despite often speaking out against religion or the existence of an intelligent God. He was a fascinating dude. 

Sagan passed away in 1996. The only mystery is why it's taken Hollywood so long to make a biopic of his life. That will change with the upcoming "Voyagers." As announced by Variety on May 5, 2023 , Andrew Garfield will star in the film as Sagan, with Daisy Edgar-Jones playing author/SETI scientist Ann Druyan, Sagan's third wife, to whom he was married to from 1981 until his death. It was Druyan's photos of Earth that largely inspired Sagan to write his book "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space."

Here's everything we know about the movie so far.

What is Voyagers about?

Per Variety, "Voyagers" will be set in 1977, when Carl Sagan first met Ann Druyan, and while he was still married to his second wife Lynn Salzman. Salzman was one of the authors of the Voyager Golden Record, an audio disc, actually made of gold, that was sent into space on a SETI mission. The disc contained music, language samples, and a lot of general information about humanity that, the authors felt, would be useful to any extraterrestrials that might find it. Druyan, at the same time, was head of the Voyager Interstellar Message Project, and also helped produce the records. Sagan selected the contents of the record. The film will be presented as a love story.

Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Lelio, who is directing "Voyagers," was one of the many kids who saw "Cosmos" when it was initially broadcast, and he found it to be a salve from the rigors of Augusto Pinochet's regime at the time. In Variety, he was quoted as saying:

"As a nine-year-old boy growing up during Chile's dictatorship, Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan's TV series 'Cosmos' had a profound impact on me, igniting my fascination with life's biggest questions and mysteries. [...] It is a dream to make a movie about the Golden Record and, within it, the inspiring love story between Carl and Ann. I'm thrilled that Andrew Garfield and Daisy Edgar-Jones will be at the center of this epic romance set against the infinite backdrop of space and time."

The Voyagers creative team

In addition to directing, Sebastián Lelio wrote the screenplay for "Voyagers" with Jessica Goldberg, based on interviews held with Ann Druyan. Lelio's previous directorial credits include "The Wonder," "A Fantastic Woman," and "Disobedience," as well as both "Gloria" and its English-language remake "Gloria Bell." He tends to make films about powerful individuals whose own character is pitted against a world that would leave them feeling oppressed. This was surely the case with "A Fantastic Woman," "Disobedience," and "Gloria."

Druyan herself is quoted by Variety as saying that she was waiting for the right creative team to tell her and Carl Sagan's stories:

"Imagine falling madly, truly in love with one of the greatest humans who ever lived, while creating a complex message about what it is to be alive, a golden record affixed to the first interstellar spacecraft launched by our species, bound to sail the Milky Way galaxy long after Earth ceases to exist. [...] It takes a movie to bring that mythic experience, that cosmic love story to vivid life. After years of searching, I feel that we have found exactly the right colleagues and artists to capture the magic of it."

The Voyagers cast

Daisy Edgar-Jones starred in the films "Fresh" and "Where the Crawdads Sing," in addition to the series "Normal People." She previously appeared opposite Andrew Garfield in the true crime drama series "Under the Banner of Heaven."

"Voyagers" will be yet another film in Garfield's filmography wherein he plays a character who wrestles with larger notions of faith and God. In 2016, Garfield starred in Martin Scorsese's "Silence," in which he played a 17th-century Jesuit monk who begins to have second thoughts about the presence of God in the world. That same year, Garfield starred in Mel Gibson's "Hacksaw Ridge," a film about a doctor who wanted to help treats soldiers during World War II, but whose Christianity prevented him from touching a weapon. Much of that film is about the pacifist underpinnings of most faiths.

Garfield also played the horrendous televangelist Jim Bakker in Michael Showalter's "The Eyes of Tammy Faye," a film largely about the hypocrisy of Bakker's "prosperity gospel" philosophies. When it comes to characters that foreground their faith, Garfield seems attracted.

The Ending Of Voyagers Explained

Voyagers , the latest science fiction film starring Tye Sheridan and Lily-Rose Depp is, in a way, a sort of Lord of the Flies set on a starship far from the reaches of Earth and human civilization. While the children in Lord of the Flies wind up trapped on an island by accident, the young people onboard this starship (which is more of an ark) are there by design. In both cases, the adolescent ensemble has to reckon with the chaos of a world without adult rules.

On its face, Voyagers has a familiar sci-fi premise: The Earth's time is running out. Richard ( Colin Farrell ), a scientist with a plan, takes a crew of young people who have never interacted with the rest of the world into space, where they will live and eventually breed the next generation of humans. The hope is that their children will eventually arrive on a new world for humanity to populate. So, a pretty standard execution of the generation ship trope.

The stars of Voyagers will never see that new world. They are the intermediary generation between the humans of Earth and their children, who will hopefully be the ones to kickstart human civilization all over again someplace new. The end of Voyagers and its meaning are tied to the chaos of what happens aboard that lonely vessel in the blackness of space. Here's the ending of  Voyagers explained.  Major spoilers ahead.

Voyagers ending isn't about the future, it's about right now

Richard's big plan once everyone's on the ship is to trick the kids into self-medicating with something called "The Blue," which is essentially a cocktail of anti-androgens and other meds designed to keep everybody sexless and docile. But the kids find out about the drug, and they stop taking it. Without The Blue, the kids become volatile, which results in Richard's death, leaving the kids to fend for themselves.

These kids may not have experienced much of Earth, but they're still human, so they do exactly what humans do — they vie for power through violence and manipulation. They even create a pretend evil alien designed to explain away Richard's death. More crewmembers die and, for a while there, it seems like the entire mission will end with no survivors.

The movie actually ends with a détente, however. Two male leaders, Christopher (Tye Sheridan) and Zac (Fionn Whitehead), who have been struggling for control of the mission, accept the compromise that Sela (Lily-Rose Depp) the medic will take charge. Christopher and Zac step down and cease hostilities, but they agree that everyone will stop taking The Blue.

The movie ends showing that these people do age, and do indeed procreate. Their progeny do make it to a new world. The resolution is a major contrast with the rest of the chaotic and violent third act. It begs a metaphorical reading of the movie's plot: Earth is our vessel, and like the crew of the fictional starship, we are often manipulated by one another into doing self-harm. We have these periods of volatility, during which we wonder if the human species will make it to see another day, but even when our interests seem diametrically opposed, it's the process of reconciliation that guarantees our future.

Voyagers looks to this future, but it reminds us of our past, too. It reminds us that there has always been chaos caused by humanity, which carries the risk of extinction. We've survived wars, we've endured genocides, and we've navigated the creation of planet-destroying weapons. All of these wounds are self-inflicted, and yet we are still here. What Voyagers is daring us to believe with its ending is that we will not only keep surviving, but that we'll thrive for so long that we'll reach out into the farthest parts of the galaxy to inhabit new worlds. It's an optimistic movie in the end.

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It has a game cast and a premise ripe with potential, but Voyagers drifts in familiar orbit rather than fully exploring its intriguing themes.

It has a decent cast and some interesting twists on its Lord of the Flies -inspired story, but Voyagers is slow to get going and sputters out in the end.

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Voyagers Is Just Lord of the Flies in Space

The characters in Voyagers are the middle children of an 86-year colonization mission — born on Earth but never really of it, and also unlikely to survive long enough to see the new planet they’re traveling toward. Their lives are slated to unfold almost entirely onboard the spaceship Humanitas , on which they’re both the crew and the future parents and grandparents of the eventual settlers. In an effort to make this regimented existence more tolerable, the planners behind the mission gestated their intergalactic travelers in a lab and raised them in a sealed facility so they wouldn’t get attached to family or to the dying Earth they’d soon leave behind. The crew is also drugged with a substance they call “blue” that dulls their senses, makes them more biddable, and dampens their sex drives, which becomes relevant as the kids grow up into a bunch of dewy-skinned teenagers living in close quarters with no clue that their state of chaste docility is chemically enforced. Then two of their number, Christopher (Tye Sheridan) and Zac (Fionn Whitehead), figure it out and stop taking their daily doses, setting off a chain of events that throws the careful order of life onboard into chaos.

On one hand, the premise of Voyagers is a heady one, asking what gives a life meaning when its course is already set, and that same life has been surrendered in service of a future that won’t be experienced. On the other, it offers all sorts of potential for soapy sci-fi shenanigans when the 30 crew members, a diverse group united in looking like they could at any moment star in a Gap ad, go cold turkey and are all plunged into hyperadolescence at the same time. But the film, which was written and directed by Neil Burger (of The Illusionist , Limitless , and more recently, The Upside ), walks a fine line between the philosophical and the frothy, managing with impressive precision to avoid being smart or fun. There is, at least, a short, giddy window in which Christopher and Zac find themselves awakening to emotional and physical sensation, racing down the hallways, zapping their fingers with electricity, and noticing the same nubile colleague, Sela (Lily-Rose Depp). But Zac acts on his newfound attraction by groping Sela against her will, and then challenges Richard Alling (Colin Farrell), the ship’s lone adult, about why he can’t just do whatever he pleases. “We’re just going to die in the end, so why can’t we do what we want? What’s the difference whether we’re good or not?”

There’s a sinking feeling accompanying the realization that, as Christopher and Zac start vying for leadership, Voyagers is becoming Lord of the Flies in space. It’s not just that divisions form in predictable and dramatically inert ways, the performances universally flat and unengaging as one side rebels against the group’s elected leader, giving into paranoia and opting for violence. It’s also that, as the film goes on, there’s a niggling sense that this futuristic retread of a familiar story is meant to say something about our moment — about, say, tribalism and strongman leadership. After a mysterious accident leads to the death of a crew member, Zac goes from “guy who just never thought about consent before” to full-on villain, leveraging fears that there’s an alien in the group’s midst to position himself as a protector and to label anyone who speaks up against him a possible carrier. His turn toward the manipulative and brutal is written as taking place so abruptly that it’s impossible to grasp him as a character or to understand how he’s able to take control so quickly. Rather than show the potential for both brutality and order in the human psyche, even in characters who’ve essentially started as blank slates, Voyagers ends up presenting Zac as an aberration leading the crew into a bout of hysterical overreaction. As allegories for the last few years go, it’s not one that offers much by way of compelling insight.

There have been a few noteworthy movies grappling with the idea of long-term space travel out in the past few years. Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar pitted a father’s conflicted desires against the nightmarish stresses of time dilation, his children getting older and older every minute he’s away from Earth, decades slipping away. There was the dismal Passengers , the movie Voyagers most seems to want to echo, a movie about how the vastness of possible years in isolation makes the most inconceivable crimes forgivable. There was Claire Denis’s High Life , equal parts sexy and repulsive, with its coerced crew of criminals hurtling resentfully toward a black hole. But the best recent film to pit the human lifetime against the impossible hugeness of space is the Swedish Aniara from 2018, which is about a luxury liner that’s sent permanently off course on a routine trip taking passengers from Earth to Mars — a kind of serious take on a scenario shared by Armando Iannucci’s Avenue 5 . As the years roll on in the film, the passengers embrace bursts of hedonism and develop new forms of spirituality and contend with all-consuming depression.

It’s a film that might come to mind when watching Voyagers , not just because it actually digs into the possibilities of its premise, but because it really engages with the idea of a life lived in transit without a destination, and with the idea of how different that really is from the lives we’re living now. Voyagers , in keeping its focus where it does, feels like a waste not just because of how predictable its beats are, but because it ends just when it feels like it’s getting interesting.

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The disastrous science fiction movie Voyagers is basically Star-lord of the Flies

It’s a familiar story, but in space, and turned dull-witted and dumb

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Everything old is eventually new again, and the tiresome science fiction drama Voyagers offers nothing more than that cliché. Filmmaker Neil Burger, who directed the first Veronica Roth adaptation, Divergent , returns to the young-adult world with Voyagers — not to be confused with Passengers , another sci-fi film where a male character manipulates a woman trapped on a spaceship with him. Voyagers has the same setup as so many space films, with a crew isolated in space and increasingly divided by fear and paranoia. But Burger doesn’t bring anything new to the material, which was lifted practically beat for beat from William Golding’s classic novel Lord of the Flies . And he ignores every opportunity to deviate from that predictable narrative path.

Like the recent Cosmic Sin , Voyagers feints toward using its space setting as an opportunity for insight about the human condition, but its execution is as lackluster as that film’s sleepwalking version of Bruce Willis. Cosmic Sin tried and failed to make some kind of point about the cost of war and the sacrifices soldiers make to protect us. Voyagers tries and fails to make some kind of point about the cost of progress and the sacrifices explorers make to protect us. But Burger plays this story so straight, with no hint of humor or irony, that Voyagers also offers no surprises. The plot reveals all its beats within the first 10 or so minutes.

It also pales in comparison to the other genre pictures it evokes: Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca , Drake Doremus and Nathan Parker’s Equals , and Claire Denis’s High Life . Those films were purposeful in depicting the implied elitism of exploration, humanity’s hubris in attempting to control the stars, and the lawlessness of space as the “final frontier.” Voyagers , meanwhile, uses stock footage of dilated pupils and crashing waves to communicate love. And when things go bad on the spaceship, he communicates adolescent viciousness by killing off mostly Black and brown teenagers. Each attempt at nuance is increasingly more facile than the last.

A self-serious opening sequence explains that Earth in 2063 is ravaged and ruined, so some humans decide to send a group to a newly discovered planet that has both water and oxygen. (Burger is so disinterested in his world-building that his script leaves it unclear whether these people are a multinational group of scientists, or some kind of elected officials, or former astronauts themselves, or what.) Because the journey will take 86 years, they send a group of children genetically engineered to be the best of the best, with mission chief Richard (Colin Farrell) along for the ride as a sort of hybrid leader, babysitter, and therapist.

The children are raised in sterile, all-white storage containers that are isolated from the rest of the world. They learn on screens and laptops, not from teachers. They don’t laugh, talk amongst themselves, or really interact with each other. They’re told every day by tinny audio recordings that they’re special, their grandchildren born on the same spaceship will colonize the planet they’re traveling to, and their sacrifice is appreciated by the world they’re leaving behind. The adults rationalize this project by saying the children won’t miss Earth because they never truly knew it. Richard has the utmost faith that these children will grow into teenagers, then adults, who do their jobs and fulfill the mission.

But 10 years later, when the children are adolescents, they aren’t as docile. Close friends Christopher (Tye Sheridan) and Zac (Fionn Whitehead) collect information about the ship as if each new insight will help clarify how they came to be born in this place, at this time, and with this responsibility. They hack into the ship’s database and discover two things that kick-start the plot: There is a hidden compartment somewhere in the vessel, and the mandatory “Blue” drink the teens are given every day has a worrying secret ingredient. What is Richard hiding from them in that room? Why is he lying to them about Blue? And what other secrets could he be harboring, especially related to his relationship with Sela (Lily-Rose Depp)?

When Christopher and Zac stop drinking Blue, Voyagers fully embraces Lord of the Flies mimicry. Divisions form within the group. The teens become feverishly obsessed with a mysterious enemy. And laziness, aggression, and heterosexual experimentation spread. (Weird and noticeable: the way the film’s Black and brown characters primarily emerge as antagonistic, promiscuous, or duplicitous.) The teens rebel, which is an understandable reaction for young people bred to die for strangers.

And yet there’s no sense that Burger has any real sympathy for these characters, or empathy about the confusion and aimlessness they must be feeling. The story is black and white, evil people vs. good people, with those designations being hammered home during numerous altercations in the ship’s mess hall, systems room, and sleeping quarters. There is no nuance to the conversations the teenagers have about bullying, sexual assault, or personal responsibility, but Voyagers insists upon them rather than indulging in any potential B-movie appeal. A malevolent force is introduced, but dropped. The script floats the idea that the teens could be forced to reproduce against their will, but that idea is abandoned, too. There are legitimate dangers in Voyagers that Burger’s script could have considered, but instead, Christopher and Zac just argue over and over again about right and wrong. Get over yourselves!

The most tiring aspect of Voyagers is the way Burger falls into a pattern where practically every action onscreen is then repetitively described by the characters present. When the power goes out, someone says, “They cut the power.” Moments later, when the antagonists look in through the door, a protagonist worriedly remarks, “They’re here.” The reliance on that kind of simplistic, descriptive dialogue means that Voyagers doesn’t dig into the larger philosophical questions that science fiction normally explores, and that this setup invites. Burger doesn’t care to contemplate whether humanity is inherently selfish, or expound on the narrative that these kids are essentially sacrificial lambs. He doesn’t even develop his characters very well: Christopher is the protective one, Sela is the logical one, Zac is the devious one. (At least Whitehead seems to be having fun with the smirking, bullying role.) There isn’t much more to them.

Voyagers ’ posturing toward being an edgier, grittier movie than it turns out to be is captured in the film’s poster. In the promo image, Sheridan and Depp’s practically nude bodies lie together in a sexually charged pose, with Earth in their rear view. They’re leaving humanity behind, the poster suggests, while wrapped up in each other instead. In reality, Voyagers is never that explicit in its depiction of a romance between Christopher and Sela, nor that pointed in its repudiation of Earth as a failed planet. Instead, Burger has crafted a shrug of a movie that insists teenagers should follow the rules and submit to the greater good, but fails to imagine what toll that kind of sacrifice would really take. It almost makes Divergent look good.

Voyagers opens in theatrical release on April 9. Before visiting a theater, Polygon recommends reading our guide to local theater safety precautions during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Voyagers review – horny Lord of the Flies in space quickly crashes to earth

Colin Farrell leads a crew of genetically engineered and chemically subdued youths on a perilous journey in a film that doesn’t have the guts to explore its perverse premise

T here’s a tantalising R-rated premise at the centre of the PG-13-rated sci-fi thriller Voyagers. In the future, the Earth is slowly becoming uninhabitable (something that’s depressingly less fiction and more science) and so a crew is assembled, by a muted Colin Farrell , to travel to another planet to check for viability, a familiar set-up given a novel spin. Because of the length of the journey – a rather off-putting 86 years – participants will be created rather than procured, spliced together from the finest DNA and grown in a lab, their sole purpose to begin the trip, procreate and let their children and then their children lead the way.

But deep into the quest, a shocking discovery is made: the crew is being drugged. A blue liquid they’re told to take daily (explained away as some sort of enzyme mixture) is revealed to be something far more nefarious: a cocktail of chemicals aimed at subduing their impulses. By removing the ability to feel or desire extremities (fear, excitement, horniness) they are then made more docile and in turn more effective at achieving their mission. When two members decide to stop taking it, disaster strikes.

The possibilities teased by writer-director Neil Burger (who dealt with a loosely alternate version of this concept in 2011’s thrill pill drama Limitless) are intriguing. How would submissive, isolated youths growing up without any influence from the outside world deal with a sudden cracked upon universe of sexual desire and rampant emotions? With training designed specifically to cover the practical side of their trip, how would they then understand concepts of consent and responsibility? What dangers would arise? But such thorniness is soon blunted in the ho hum execution, a Lord of the Flies-lite drama that plays out more like a YA adaptation of a book fans would claim is far better.

The trippy neon trailer would have you believe that we’re entering Gaspar Noé-adjacent territory, all psychedelic head fuckery and playful perversity, but Burger is too restrained, too polite to take us anywhere quite so extreme. The heightened emotions felt by the crew are never really felt by us the audience, there’s a headiness that’s missing and in the brief moments when Burger does try to convey the characters’ giddy intensity, he relies on a failed visual motif, a dated montage of discordant images, closer to a musty 90s Windows screensaver than something from a film released in 2021. The script never really grapples with the dark implications of his conceit, how without regulation and law, the youths would embrace their wilder side in more horrifying ways, choosing instead to tiptoe rather than forcefully tread, a psychosexual cautionary tale rendered impotent.

Sex is lightly suggested (again in opposition to what the trailers promise) while any form of sexual fluidity is nowhere to be seen, Burger’s script perhaps, hopefully unintentionally implying that queerness is less nature and more nurture. But such big thinking would suggest that much thinking has actually gone into Voyagers, a generous assertion, given how anything remotely challenging is quickly chucked into deep space and replaced by rote formula. The crew inevitably divides into warring factions battling for supremacy but such little care is taken with the characters that we struggle to care who wins out. Tye Sheridan, Fionn Whitehead and Lily Rose-Depp are the only three who get the lightest of look-ins but not one of them is able to do much with the scraps they’ve been given, leaving the ramped-up conflict ineffective as the film crashes toward a predictable conclusion. The production design is sleek but anonymous and aside from the specifics of the set-up, there are no particularly inventive elements to Burger’s vision of the future, nothing to distract us from the rather dull human drama.

It’s all just too sanitised and safe, a journey that stumbles as it takes us from the unknown to the familiar, a film that plods when it should stride. How did a bracing idea about rebellion, sexual awakening and lawlessness turn out so boring?

Voyagers is out in cinemas in the US on 9 April, and in the UK on 8 October on Sky Cinema and NOW.

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Summary With the future of the human race at stake, a group of young men and women, bred for intelligence and obedience, embark on an expedition to colonize a distant planet. But when they uncover disturbing secrets about the mission, they defy their training and begin to explore their most primitive natures. As life on the ship descends into ch ... Read More

Directed By : Neil Burger

Written By : Neil Burger

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Marianne sancar, patrick bucur, christopher - 4 years old, rufus bateman, zac - 4 years old, jaquelin capusan, sela - 4 years old, rafi wilder, christopher - 8 years old, antonia dragoman, sela - 8 years old, critic reviews.

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April 1957: Rational engineer Faber's plane crashes in Mexico. He learns that he became a dad in 1938. He takes a ship from NYC to France and meets cute, young Sabeth. Fate? April 1957: Rational engineer Faber's plane crashes in Mexico. He learns that he became a dad in 1938. He takes a ship from NYC to France and meets cute, young Sabeth. Fate? April 1957: Rational engineer Faber's plane crashes in Mexico. He learns that he became a dad in 1938. He takes a ship from NYC to France and meets cute, young Sabeth. Fate?

• Volker Schlöndorff
• James Ragan
• Sam Shepard
• Julie Delpy
• Barbara Sukowa
• 26 User reviews
• 16 Critic reviews
• 4 wins & 4 nominations

• Walter Faber

• Herbert Hencke

• Joachim Hencke

• Lady Stenographer

• New York Doorman
• (as Charles Hayward)

• Restroom Attendant
• Unesco Delegate
• James Ragan (uncredited)
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia The movie premiered in Germany in March 1991, a month before Max Frisch, who wrote the novel on which the movie is based on, die in in April 1991. The premiere in his home country Switzerland was in May 1991, a month after his death.
• Goofs The movie is set in 1957, but the iconic Citroen DS Faber rents for the trip with Sabeth was first produced in 1962.

Walter Faber : [to Sabeth] Would you marry me?

• Connections Featured in Siskel & Ebert: Wayne's World/Medicine Man/Final Analysis/Voyager/Rhapsody in August (1992)
• Soundtracks Careless Love Performed by Ute Lemper Arranged & produced by John Harle Written by W.C. Handy , Martha Koenig & Spencer Williams

User reviews 26

• suzanneoxford
• Nov 13, 2010
• How long is Voyager? Powered by Alexa
• January 31, 1992 (United States)
• Pecado de amor
• RMS Queen Mary - 1126 Queens Highway, Long Beach, California, USA
• Bioskop Film
• Action Films
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• Feb 2, 1992

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 57 minutes
• Dolby Stereo

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Reddit's Two-Sentence Horror Stories subreddit  is the perfect place to get in the spooky mood in a short period of time. Vote up your favorite two-sentence scary stories.

Love Connection

From Redditor u/ lurker1125 :

My blind date texted that he'd finally arrived and was sorry for being 15 minutes late to pick me up. But we'd already been driving for 10.

Mixed Messages

From Redditor u/ thisappcausesmepain :

“EARTH TO VOYAGER 227, DO NOT RETURN, I REPEAT, DO NOT R-” Nothing but static over the comms for 12 days, then it returned: “False alarm, voyagers, you are cleared to return home.”

Familiar Stranger

From Redditor u/ KangarooDense : 

Out of sheer boredom, I turned on the radio in my kidnapper's basement, only to hear that he had been arrested the day before. I thought they were still searching for me, but then I heard my own voice saying how much I was glad to finally be found.

Hitching A Ride

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After the tour bus accident, we boarded another bus which arrived and [was] waiting there. When I asked the driver why my friends weren't getting on the bus, he replied: “Because they survived the accident.”

Brother's Keeper

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At the dinner table, my brother always spat on my plate when Mum [wasn't] looking and said that he'd punch me if I told on him. Many years later, at Mum's funeral, he said it was the only way to slip the antidote in.

From Redditor u/ HonoraryB*****d :

Tearing up, my mother opens her arms for a hug as she whispers, “Sweetie, it has been way too long! Come here!” Horrified, I start covering her grave faster.

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As he walked into the strange house, he thought the three statues looked a bit TOO realistic. So did the next person who saw the four statues.

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Common sense media reviewers.

Formulaic, soapy teen space drama has lust, sex, violence.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Promotes teamwork, courage, perseverance. Story re

Richard cares about the kids and the mission. He w

At least five characters die in various ways. Thre

Discussion of how a drug suppresses sexual desire

"Liar," "have you all gone crazy?," "fat pus-fille

The teens take a vitamin supplement that's actuall

Parents need to know that Voyagers is a sci-fi thriller about a group of 30 children-turned-teens who are on a one-way space mission to find a potentially habitable planet for humans to colonize. The movie, which has been compared to everything from Lord of the Flies to The 100 , stars Colin…

Positive Messages

Promotes teamwork, courage, perseverance. Story reveals importance of impulse control, collaboration, and honesty.

Positive Role Models

Richard cares about the kids and the mission. He willingly leaves Earth to accompany them on their mission, even though he knows he'll die on it. Sela is intelligent and kind. Christopher is brave, wants everyone to work together. Zac acts like a hedonist and sociopath who believes everyone should do whatever they want. Although supporting cast is diverse, main characters are White and heterosexual. The only prescient voice of reason is a young Black woman who's repeatedly told to shut up (and called fat because she's 10 pounds heavier than all of the other supermodel-thin young women).

Violence & Scariness

At least five characters die in various ways. Three are killed by weapons or by being brutally beaten (a bloody, dead body is visible). One is kicked out of the ship after a prolonged fight. A few frenzied chases by armed characters looking for unarmed characters. In a flashback, a character's death is revealed not to be accidental. A young man sexually assaults (gropes above her clothes) a young woman.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Discussion of how a drug suppresses sexual desire and pleasure. When young adults stop taking their hormone suppressants, they start having bolts of lust and desire, depicted by quick images of women and men touching and kissing. Two young men look at the same young woman longingly, with one staring at her neck, her face, etc. Once others stop taking the drug, there's lots of flirting, touching, sex. One quick glimpse shows a couple having sex standing up in a semi-public place; in other scenes, there's implied sex (a couple makes out in bed and next morning is shown wearing just underwear; a bunch of semi-clothed people are shown on a bed together, touching; a few different couples kiss passionately). Some characters hang out shirtless (males) or in bras.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

"Liar," "have you all gone crazy?," "fat pus-filled face," "genetic defect," "shut up."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

The teens take a vitamin supplement that's actually a drug that suppresses hormones and stabilizes mood/behavior. The medical officer injects someone to incapacitate them.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Voyagers is a sci-fi thriller about a group of 30 children-turned-teens who are on a one-way space mission to find a potentially habitable planet for humans to colonize. The movie, which has been compared to everything from Lord of the Flies to The 100 , stars Colin Farrell as the one adult aboard the spaceship; the rest of the starring cast is young-adult actors like Tye Sheridan , Fionn Whitehead , and Lily-Rose Depp . There's a fair bit of non-graphic sex and romance involved, as well as violence after the teens stop taking hormone-suppressing, mood-stabilizing drugs disguised as vitamin supplements. Some scenes get quite dark, with moments ranging from a woman's body being groped to the disturbing deaths of at least four young people at others' hands. Language is very mild ("shut up," "liar," "shut your fat face"), and there's no iffy substance use. While the supporting cast is diverse, the main characters are White, and a young Black woman who's the only voice of reason is repeatedly told to shut up. Families with teens can discuss the concept of nature vs. nurture, as well as the movie's messages about the importance of impulse control, collaboration, and honesty. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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• Parents say (1)
• Kids say (6)

Based on 1 parent review

Lord of the Flies is much better, spend your time reading that instead - meh, movie is a solid meh

What's the story.

VOYAGERS is writer-director Neil Burger's sci-fi space opera about a near future in which Earth has become increasingly uninhabitable. The world's scientists find a possible solution: a planet that could be habitable by humans. It will take 86 years -- three generations -- to arrive there, so a group of specifically bred babies is brought up indoors to make up the crew of 30 students who will begin the mission. Scientist Richard ( Colin Farrell ) offers to accompany the children, who are 8 when they take off. Ten years later, Christopher ( Tye Sheridan ), one of the brilliant now-18-year-olds, discovers that a daily "vitamin supplement" they've all been ingesting is actually a hormone suppressant and mood stabilizer. Christopher and his best friend, Zac ( Fionn Whitehead ), decide to stop taking the daily supplement and have a nearly instantaneous awakening to feelings of lust, jealousy, competition, and aggression. The sudden influx of hormones coupled with a tragedy creates a toxic, divisive environment for the newly "liberated" teens onboard.

Is It Any Good?

Neil Burger's sci-fi thriller would have been a better series than this slick but underwhelming (and predictable) teen flick. Like Lord of the Flies meets The 100 in space, Voyagers ' plot starts off promisingly, even though audiences will have questions after it's revealed that the children were initially expected to be on the ship by themselves, without an adult present. From there, viewers may wonder how the brightest minds in the world ever thought that filling a ship with unsupervised tweens and teens would lead to anything but mayhem. Plot roadblocks aside, however, Sheridan does a good job as an older teen who starts to question what mission control -- and, by extension, Richard -- has told them all about the drug that's being forced upon them. Farrell does his best to be a father figure and leader, but never underestimate the power of the teen libido, Burger seems to say. What's slightly laughable is that on a ship full of attractive, diverse young people, both Christopher and Zac (who are both White) must of course fall for the same White girl -- in this case, medical officer Sela ( Lily-Rose Depp , who doesn't demonstrate much acting range in the role).

The only prescient voice of reason is Phoebe (Chanté Adams), a Black mission specialist who's repeatedly told to shut up (and, ludicrously, is called fat because she's 10 pounds heavier than all of the other supermodel-thin young women). It doesn't take psychic powers to determine early on that she's the Piggy of this group. The movie's cinematography and editing are well executed, and the actors don't have to do much more than act some combination of compliant, scared, aroused -- or, in the case of a couple of the baddies, psychopathic. Whitehead, with his Tom Hiddleston -like cheekbones and narrowed eyes, is well cast as the beautiful but bad villain. If audiences want to see a cast of attractive early 20-something actors in life-threatening and sexy situations, there are far better films than this eye-rollingly formulaic movie.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the violence in Voyagers. Is it necessary to the story? Why, or why not?

What do you think the movie's message is about "nature vs. nurture"? Is there any reason to expect that the "gifted" and "brilliant" biological children of world-class scientists, artists, engineers, and so forth are "above" baser behaviors?

How would you characterize the diversity and representation (or lack thereof) in this film? Why is the other characters' treatment of Phoebe especially problematic?

Did you notice the characters demonstrating teamwork , courage , and perseverance ? Why are those important character strengths ?

Discuss the use of a "love triangle" in the movie. Is it effective? Does it make sense? Why do you think so many teen-focused stories feature a love triangle?

Movie Details

• In theaters : April 9, 2021
• On DVD or streaming : April 30, 2021
• Cast : Tye Sheridan , Lily-Rose Depp , Fionn Whitehead
• Director : Neil Burger
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Lionsgate
• Genre : Science Fiction
• Run time : 108 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : violence, some strong sexuality, bloody images, a sexual assault, and brief strong language
• Last updated : March 2, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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