I Found a Racist Movie!

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I’m not the type of person who goes around looking for racism. I’m fairly oblivious to it really. It has to be pretty noticeable before I start to have these thoughts. I tend to just watch movies and enjoy them without constantly thinking about what it all means. I spent far too much time here thinking about the meaning of things to bother when I’m merely trying to relax. However, when I saw Voyagers, even I couldn’t miss the racism.

This 2020 release was clearly meant to be a teen movie of the summer but summer was canceled and now it’s HBO Max. I just like space movies and disasters. It sounded fun and I was in the mood for fun. Earth is dying and people are trying to save humanity? I’m in, let’s go for it.

The plot

The plot of this movie is pretty simple. Earth is dying due to climate change and other planetary changes. The governments of the world decide to create a space ship to save the best of humanity. They gather DNA and create babies who have the right genetics to carry forward humanity. Their job isn’t to do anything other than to live, breed, and have children that will live long enough to make it to a new planet. They are educated and given the best of everything in order to accomplish this one mission: live long enough to have children that will populate the new Earth. When it becomes obvious that the mission needs to start sooner rather than later the lead scientist decides that he will raise all the children on his own, en route to the new Earth knowing that he will die before they arrive. This is crucial because the children spend the bulk of their childhood on a space ship with only him and various media as an influence.

The scary part of the story kicks off when one of the boys rebels (as young men do) and the only adult dies in a freak accident. It becomes lord of the flies in no time as the late teen/early 20s kids, who have known almost nothing else besides this space ship (by design) need to suddenly be responsible for all the duties to keep the ship and themselves alive without the guiding hand of an adult. A nice metaphor for burgeoning adulthood. However, the racism starts at this point as well because, per usual Hollywood, the only person who understands what is happening is the lone black girl and no one listens to her.

Now this is where the racism kicks into high gear.

This Movie is Racist Damn It

Clearly, the casting director forgot to call Lupita Nyongo’s agent and get availability because the lack of color in the cast is pretty obvious especially once they shoot the black girl! The only decent character who says anything reasonable and actually wants to follow the program! She actually wants to follow the rules and no one wants to listen to her even though she is the only one talking any sense for most of the movie. While everyone else is convinced the ship is being taken over by some unknown force, she is trying to bring everyone back to reason and her reward is being shot at the half-way mark.

At this point, I was scanning for people of color. I didn’t see a black boy but there was a darker skinned boy, possibly Hispanic. Somehow after looking at the best of earths genetics, they forgot most of Africa and the Caribbean. I guess they didn’t need Usain Bolt on the new planet. Neil deGrasse Tyson was unavailable too.

Now that the pesky black girl has been dispatched, its down to the nice, kind white people to figure out what to do next. They decide to have a popular election and a new leader is elected but he is immediately unpopular with a certain segment of the crew and what can only be described as Lord of the Flies + Civil War breaks out onboard.

It’s the nice, kind, pretty white couple that ends up saving the day. They kill the slightly-off-white evil-doer and dispatch him out into the vacuum of space. The pretty white girl gets elected chief officer. Instead of artificial insemination, she gets pregnant naturally with her man and has a baby. The father, our hero, who led us through the cives bellum looks on proudly as his perfect, aryan genetics are passed on to save mankind.

Who wrote this? Hermann Goering?

White saviors

The end of the movie is pretty obvious. The kids who left, earth are now elderly and their children at standing at the window as the space ship approaches the new Earth. Hardly a face of color in whole bunch. The only folks to survive are white or white adjacent (slightly tan). On the new Earth, in this movie, there will be now dark-skinned black people or any other ethnicity. Just White folks, Asians, and some slightly tan, European looking people.

Sometimes it feels like white people want to throw black people off of planet Earth. It seems like some people believe life would just be better if we could off-load all the brown people or, even better yet, just go to a new planet and create the whites-only utopia that certain people have always wanted. That does seem to be the message of this movie: the only hope for humanity is a whites only Utopia.

The White Savior trope rolls deep in media all the time. Hollywood plays into this idea often and so it isn’t a surprise that it pops up here in this mid-tier movie. Somehow, the way it was done in this Voyagers film just rubbed me the wrong way. It is so obvious that the goal is to create a White Utopia. In this time of racial tension and in the light of all that has happened in recent months, it just feels wrong. I’m not one for forcing diversity in movies and I don’t think casting should be done on skin color alone. However, if you’re going to write a movie about saving humanity, it seems to me that it would be a good idea to save all of humanity, not just the European part of humanity which is a global minority (by far). If you want to check out this movie it’s on HBO Max.