Note: The writer of this review has followed travel on a digital screen from home. Before making the decision to see it – or any other film – in a cinema, please consider the health risks involved. There it is an interview with scientific experts.
If nothing else, the latest Hollywood space odyssey, travel, invents a new solution to the riddle of intergalactic travel, the old equation of distance versus time. The film is set in 2063, when the ends of an increasingly uninhabitable Earth began to plan a new beginning beyond the stars. They have found a planet that can support human life. The problem is that it will take 86 years to get there. How will someone survive long enough to establish humanity’s new home? In the science fiction of yesteryear, NASA’s largest fictional minds have looked at cryogenic sleep, wormholes, and accelerated speed to traverse the vast expanse of the cosmos without rushing on the road. Into the travel, the strategy is much more long-term: the crew will consist of children, who will grow up on board the ship and will then have their own children, who will in turn grow until birth and grow bigchildren who will relocate the species. Instead of leaving the world a better place for future generations, they leave the world for a better place to be inherited and colonized by their descendants.
Most of them travel is set 10 years after launch. The crew, born and raised from anonymous donors for the sole purpose of completing the mission, grew from test tube babies to scary remote automatons – they are like wunderkinds in private school with young Amish sheltered. Supervising their one-way voyage is the ship’s captain and project manager, Richard (Colin Farrell), who has established himself in the uncomfortable role of the figure of authority for all purposes: He is the father, boss, teacher, therapist. To keep everyone pregnant and out of trouble, teenagers are given glasses of something called Blue – a liquid that, like Lois Lowry’s mandatory discontinuation drug. giver, suppresses the more intense emotions and natural desires of growing boys and girls. But what will happen once humanity’s last adolescent hope ceases to take the chemical equivalent of a cold shower?
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Anyone weaned on a constant diet of life stories in a tin can floating through the unknown can probably anticipate the trajectory – the psychological, technological and potentially alien obstacles that these school children face at home. Why quote each antecedent? This is how space madness is. Better to scan travel for allegorical meaning; there is no lack of it in the tribal discord that erupts from its ominous noise. As these YA astronauts come into contact with their basic instincts – a journey that begins with an exploratory touch, before turning into what teen spirit authority Kurt Cobain once called territorial abominations – the film suggests a classic rebellion story. in the classroom, vacuumed in SF space. Is children’s primary pivot a metaphor for a sudden reddening of pubescent hormones and perhaps the general disappointment that sometimes accompanies them? Another way, among many, to read the film is as a drama about a generation that goes against the expectations of another – about the Zoomers (in spirit, if it were not) who push back the environmental and professional obligations created by the failures of their elders.
The problem with travel is that his power is fully allegorical. The more the film begins to resemble a deep space Lord of the Flies– complete with the fabled beast, ostracized Piggy and urgent pursuits in the futuristic version of an isolated island – it becomes more predictable. Neil Burger, the director in charge of this hunting vessel, gives the conventions a seductive glow of utilitarian plausibility: he made a zero-G thriller, which is at the same time beautiful in its cosmic and cosmetic and claustrophobic design. credit how unpleasant space travel is. What it has not done is draw the public into the sensory awakening that drives the plot. Burger tries to express that experience by feverishly assembling collapsing lightning, wild animals, blooming flowers and dilating pupils. In essence, it’s the same way he visualized the balloon intellect Unlimited– “mind expansion” as a super-short B-roll stock music video, taken from a database.
Perhaps the film’s growing conflict would be more interesting if the characters themselves (played by Tye Sheridan and Lily-Rose Depp, from a set of twenty-year-old model colleague types) weren’t like that. naked eyes. That is, to be correct, by design: we follow a group of saviors born literally, living lives dedicated only to great duty and scientific protocol. Of course they would be weirdly socialized robot teenagers with no personalities. But the film’s climate struggle, the war between rational responsibility and its hedonistic rejection, never wins more than an abstract pulse, because the young Americans who take part in the struggle are so interchangeable. (No more DunkerqueFionn Whitehead, the mad sage of a villain’s power, makes a great impression.) travel he is clever and funny enough and even occasionally ingenious in his vision of a future placed in the hands of children who struggle with the burden of their importance to him. But it is also a story about the struggle for humanity that makes humanity itself theoretical, just like the scientists in the film who dreamed of the wrong experiment in the manifest galactic destiny.