Voyagers ( 2021 )
this movie isn’t groundbreaking by any stretch of imagination but it’s not bad IMO - certainly not as bad as the ratings suggest
better than anything Nolan will ever make as far as i am concerned
also it stars Johnny Depp’s daughter who looks OKAY but i expected better …
basically the plot is that a group of children is grown in test tubes and then raised in a controlled environment in order to be sent to space to colonize a planet that will take 3 generations of space travel to reach …
mission planners do everything they can to make sure these kids don’t start melting down and turning on each other … but predictably, their plan fails in a spectacular fashion !
the film clearly is a remake of something like 20 other movies from Space Odyssey to Das Experiment and everything in between … but i’m OK with that …
they have two sexy girls in the movie and the movie is not completely brainless so that’s good enough for me !
maybe the biggest knock against this movie is that it could have been better. the movie feels very rushed - it skips from one plot point to the next without taking breaks in an attempt to make the plot fit inside 2 hours mark. on one hand i’m glad i was able to finish the movie before sunrise ( birds were singing towards the end of it, but it was still dark ) … but on the other hand it might have been better as a 3 hour movie with some more character development and some more sex …
considering that the plot is that it’s a ship full of genetically superior young people i was expecting more sex, which is why i watched it in the first place, but as always i missed the part that it’s a PG-13 rated movie …
still, i don’t regret watching. it was reasonably sexy for a PG-13 movie, never boring, not too predictable, somewhat intelligent - all in all i enjoyed it and recommend it, especially for younger people since almost all the characters in the movie are about 20 years old …
best i can explain it is that if you never see this movie you will be perfectly OKAY because the ideas covered in it are also covered in many other movies …
BUT it does have ideas in it and aside from being aimed at teenagers and having very rushed pacing is actually pretty decently made …
the average rating on MovieLens is just 2.8 and it predicted only 3.0 for me, but i’m going to actually give it 4.5 stars … i just liked it, i’m sorry !
perhaps another knock against this movie is that basically everything is stated very plainly like in “Snowpiercer” ( 2013 ) without really asking the viewer to try to understand anything … this i think is in part because it’s a PG-13 movie and in part because they tried to keep it short. As i said before it could have been a 5 star movie if it was a 3 hour long R rated movie instead of a 2 hour long PG-13 rated one. they really pushed to keep it simple and short … which is sad but an understandable choice.
this movie reminds me of “Oblivion” ( 2013 / Tom Cruise ) in the way it doesn’t have a serious feel but actually examines serious subjects.
i’ll take that any day over a movie that tries to be serious but is a joke like most Nolan movies, though i would have preferred if it was serious in both substance and presentation.
while watching i kept thinking that if this movie was shot 50 years ago it would have been a classic, but because all of these ideas have been previously explored and they are beating a dead horse at this point perhaps it was appropriate to not try to be so serious about it …
don’t know if you can tell but i prefer new movies to old ones. just as i prefer new music to old music. just as i prefer new everything to old everything. i make a very shitty conservative maybe because i’m not.