voyage movie 2019

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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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.

• movie review
• neil burger
• tye sheridan
• lily-rose depp
• fionn whitehead
• colin farrell

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The Prince's Voyage

An old prince runs aground on an unknown shore. Wounded and lost, he is found by young Tom and taken in by his parents, two researchers forced into exile ... The prince, guided by Tom, disco... Read all An old prince runs aground on an unknown shore. Wounded and lost, he is found by young Tom and taken in by his parents, two researchers forced into exile ... The prince, guided by Tom, discovers with enthusiasm and fascination a society that is however frozen and sclerotic . An old prince runs aground on an unknown shore. Wounded and lost, he is found by young Tom and taken in by his parents, two researchers forced into exile ... The prince, guided by Tom, discovers with enthusiasm and fascination a society that is however frozen and sclerotic .

• Jean-François Laguionie
• Xavier Picard
• Enrico Di Giovanni
• Thomas Sagols
• Gabriel Le Doze
• 1 User review
• 23 Critic reviews
• 1 win & 1 nomination

• (as Marie-Madeleine Burguet-Le Doze)
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• Trivia Several references to Brittany in the film. The author of the book the Prince browses on his bed is breton, and Victor ABERVRACH the professor is named after the aber Vrac'h, an estuary in Finistère, Brittany.
• Connections Follows A Monkey's Tale (1999)

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• Runtime 1 hour 17 minutes

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Fantastic Voyage Reviews

With such titles as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes, the 1960s proved to be a particularly rich decade for science fiction cinema, and Fantastic Voyage stands as one of the period's most imaginative efforts.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 23, 2023

…even if the process work is poor by today’s standards, this voyage still seems fantastic today…

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 9, 2023

The science is shaky at best but the imaginative spectacle is marvelous: scuba diving surgeons battle white blood cells, tap the lungs to replenish the oxygen supply, and shoot the aorta like daredevil surfers.

Full Review | Mar 4, 2023

A nonstop adventure of sizable proportions.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Aug 24, 2020

Technically, the film is only too obviously under all kinds of strain, as if trying to live up to a budget which it never wanted in the first place.

Full Review | Apr 2, 2020

Ignoring the painfully slow first third, the rest of the film is an enjoyable, basic sci-fi adventure. It won't wow you, but it will entertain you.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 7, 2019

"Fantastic Voyage" is a fun adventure with some incredible sets representing the inside of the human body. What it lacks in reality is made up by beauty and skill.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Oct 14, 2013

Not be as suspenseful as it once was, because we've seen many shots of the body's interior and we no longer have the undercurrents of the Cold War that made life itself an edge-of-the-seat affair. But it's still a fun sci-fi excursion.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Oct 11, 2013

Despite the film being nearly 50 years old, it's still pretty impressive what they were able to accomplish using practical photography. Sure it's campy, but it's the kitschy design that makes it so much fun to watch.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Oct 7, 2013

That it carries the viewer along is thanks largely to its kitsch charm, its energetic pace and the stunning sets designed by Harper Goff.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 19, 2013

Half planetarium, half lava lamp

Full Review | Feb 6, 2010

Fascinating still, but suffers from lack of more sophisticated special effects. Still...imagine Raquel Welch moving around inside.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 14, 2009

Their voyage through the body's bloodstream past assorted organs was created by inventive special effects that make this one of the more visually interesting science fiction films of its era.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 4, 2007

The lavish production, boasting some brilliant special effects and superior creative efforts, is an entertaining, enlightening excursion through inner space -- the body of a man.

Full Review | Jun 4, 2007

This special effects extravaganza from 1966 has proved surprisingly enduring, despite a technical quality crude by contemporary standards; perhaps it's the screwball poetry of the plot.

...our own human interior was revealed, like a Jacques Cousteau travelogue, in screen-filling vistas of surreal canals and chambers filled with floating psychedelia and the amorphous Jell-O colors of a Jimi Hendrix concert.

Full Review | Jun 3, 2007

An opportunity missed, therefore -- especially as the imaginative sets are slightly tackily realised -- but fun all the same.

Full Review | Jan 26, 2006

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 30, 2005

Well directed science fiction

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 13, 2005

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 1, 2005

In German sci-fi “Final Voyage” two people search in space for a new home

November 11, 2020 Ganiveta News 0

Final Voyage (2019), also known as Das letzte Land in the original German language, is another proof that with passion and a good technique anyone can make an enjoyable science-fiction movie placed in deep space.

The movie centers on two outlaws on the run who encounter an old abandoned spaceship in the desert. At the last minute, they escape their pursuers into space and set off in search of a new home. More and more, however, they are drawn into fundamentally different directions. While Adem discovers the ship’s enigmatic past, Novak is increasingly drawn into the spell of hypnotic power.

The movie is the debut film of producer, writer, and director Marcel Barion , who has also been in charge of several technical duties like cinematographer, image and sound editor, composer, and visual effects creator. The debutants Milan Pesl and Torben Föllmer form the cast.

In a world where digital effects are dominant, it is a gift for the eyes to face a movie where mostly all the effects are practical. The filmmakers avoided CGI at all costs. The computer was only used for compositing layers of practical effects, like classically built models and miniatures (spaceship, space station…), simple holes in black cardboard (stars), color shapes in a water tank (clouds and space nebulae), pancakes (landscapes and planet surfaces) or styrofoam formations (rocks and caves), as the filmmakers have noted.

Final Voyage (2019) has been part of several international film festivals along 2019 including Berlin Independent Film Festival , Berlin Sci-fi Filmfest , Miami International Science Fiction Film Festival , Other Worlds Austin SciFi Film Festival , and SciFi Film Festival where it has achieved several nominations and awards. It has also been part of the line-up in Filmfestival Max Ophüls Preis in Germany, Sci-Fi-London Film Festival in the UK, Through the Looking Glass International Film Festival in Italy, Lund International Fantastic Film Festival in Sweden, and Razor Reel Fantastic Film Festival Bruges in Belgium.

The movie is available online since November 11, 2020. Here you can watch its official trailer.

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Das Letzte Land AKA Final Voyage [2019]

It’s movies like Das Letzte Land AKA Final Voyage that give me hope about the future of science fiction movies. This atmospheric and immersive near-masterpiece is a testament to what can be achieved with a small budget and a lot of dedication. The opening scene with just the night sky sets the mood for the rest of the movie. This is a slow-burner with just two actors set inside an ancient, but still functioning spaceship. The style is delightfully retro and it reminded me of another great little sci-fi gem Prospect . The ship’s interior and interface are similar to those of great classics of the seventies and eighties. Alien is the first movie that comes to mind. This retro vibe seems to be quite popular these days. And for a good reason too as the aesthetics, immediately feel familiar and somehow realistic.

As you probably guessed from the title Das Letzte Land, Final Voyage is a German movie. Don’t think that this will be a problem in any way. Although I prefer to watch movies without dubbing, I checked out the English dub for this one and it was good. I don’t think it will be a spoiler when I tell you that despite the claustrophobic intro, we will venture forth. I’ll just leave at that as I want you to enjoy the story as much as I did.

Speaking of which, I have to also tell you that towards the end it kind of dissipates. Throughout the movie, there will be a lot of small mysteries and unanswered questions prompting for a grand finale. That finale did not come. You can see that they were trying to keep the attention of the viewer with something going on but that something feels far inferior compared to some other elements of the movie. Although, when you think of it, Final Voyage ended in the same fashion as it started and unfolded. Still, this chunky middle portion of the movie and weak dialogue sour the taste of an otherwise quite immersive and engaging flick.

Adem, a prisoner on a faraway and desolate planet, managed to escape his captors during a heavy storm. With guards looking all over for him, he stumbles upon a derelict spaceship obscured by layers of dirt and dust. Adem manages to get inside using the ship’s engine exhaust shaft. And just when he thought he got away, one of the guards appears. However, it seems that he isn’t too keen on bringing the prisoner back but is more interested in the state of the vessel. If only they could make it work…

If you’re not a fan of this type of movie, you might find the whole thing a bit tedious and boring. This is the first feature film for young and talented Marcel Barion who wrote, directed, and did almost everything else. As such, we can forgive the somewhat contrived story developments and flawed pacing. If he only cut the runtime to about eighty minutes instead of almost two hours, this would be a much more approachable movie. Still, it’s a very immersive and atmospheric piece of science fiction that will get space buds going again.

The scenes in the cramped cockpit are interspersed with magnificent and beautiful space vistas full of stars. They really honed in on this sense that we’re a small spec of dust in the vastness of the space. As someone who spent dozens of hours playing Elite Dangerous, I know the feeling all too well. The visuals are mind-blowing considering the budget. And even more so when you find out that they are all practical effects! They look much better than in some mid-level science fiction movies, getting close to the big ones.

They also fit in quite nicely with the retro style and prove that you can still use them. In the end, The Final Land (the literal translation of the title) is an intriguing movie that science fiction fans will appreciate and love. If you liked it, you might wanna check out above mentioned Prospect , Teleios , Stranded , and Cosmos when it comes to modern movies. And if you would like to go back to the eighties and nineties here are a couple of recommendations: Moontrap , The Dark Side Of The Moon , Moon 44 , and Alien Cargo .

Director: Marcel Barion

Writer: Marcel Barion

Cast: Torben Föllmer, Milan Pesl, Vincenz Türpe

Fun Facts: There is no CGI in this film. The computer was only used for compositing layers of practical effects, like classically built models and miniatures (spaceship, spacestation…), simple holes in black cardboard (stars), color shapes in a watertank (clouds and space nebulae), pancakes (landscapes and planet surfaces) or styrofoam formations (rocks and caves).

IMDb Link: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9474736/

The Prince’s Voyage

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