108 min | PG-13 | April 9, 2021 | Lionsgate
Thirty kids ship out on an eighty-six-year mission to colonize a distant planet. None of them will live to see it, and someone decides to stop taking the drug that keeps them calm. Turns out a spaceship full of horny teenagers with no rules is exactly as stupid as it sounds.
A crew of genetically engineered young people travels toward a habitable planet they will never reach. The voyage takes generations, so the mission depends on their children’s children arriving sane and functional. The crew drinks a daily blue liquid that suppresses desire and aggression to keep order. Two of them discover the drug and stop taking it, and the suppression breaks. This is Lord of the Flies relocated to a starship, and the film says so loudly enough that the comparison becomes the whole idea rather than a starting point.
Tye Sheridan plays Christopher with a watchful restraint that suits the film’s better instincts. He registers the danger before anyone else and refuses to perform certainty he does not feel. Fionn Whitehead plays Zac as the opportunist who learns that fear is a tool and uses it without conscience. Whitehead finds the specific pleasure Zac takes in controlling a crowd. Lily-Rose Depp plays Sela as the medical officer caught between the two factions, and Colin Farrell plays Richard, the lone adult chaperone whose early exit removes the only authority the kids respect.
Neil Burger writes and directs, and his cleanest idea is visual. He cuts away to brief flashes of fire, flesh, and predatory animals whenever the drug wears off and the crew feels raw sensation for the first time. The device announces the loss of control more than it dramatizes it. The production design keeps the ship sterile and white, all corridors and recessed lighting, so the violence reads against a blank background. The score leans on low pulsing drones that push the tension the script never earns on its own.
The film states its thesis in the opening minutes and then spends the rest confirming it. Strip away the rules and people become animals. Burger never complicates that premise or tests it against a harder question. The cast commits to material that gives them archetypes instead of characters, and the result is a sleek, watchable allegory with nothing underneath the surface it polishes so carefully.