The Midnight Sky: Muddled George Clooney Space Actioner Never Achieves Liftoff
By Liam Lacey
Rating: C
It’s the end of the world and everything is terrible in The Midnight Sky, the seventh film directed by George Clooney, who also stars in this post-apocalyptic survival drama as a dying famous scientist.
With a strong supporting cast (Felicity Jones, Kyle Chandler, and David Oyelowo), good visual effects sequences, a fervent score by Alexandre Desplat and a human extinction theme, one might expect this film — released on Netflix December 23 — to be an Oscar contender. Not to forget that it casts its director/star in a saintly light.
But The Midnight Sky is not always easy on the brain. The script bounces back and forth between Earth and space through a succession of nail-biter predicaments, mixes in some awkward flashbacks, and relies on a third-act narrative cheat. And for all that, it feels derivative of better films.
Formally, the most daring idea here is to split the story into two parts. The opening places us in a remote Arctic three weeks after a devastating accident known only as “The Event” has destroyed most of life on Earth. The residents of the observatory are about to be transported by helicopter to an underground sanctuary, except for the terminally ill Dr. Augustine Lofthouse (Clooney, hollow-eyed with a fierce mop-like beard) who has elected to stay behind to die.
While performing blood transfusions on himself and knocking back whisky, he recalls, in flashbacks, his days as a young astronomer (played by Ethan Peck, with his voice digitally altered to sound like Clooney’s). The young Augustine predicts at a lecture that human life could live on newly discovered moon of Jupiter.
After his talk, he meets and becomes involved with a fellow scientist, Jean (Sophie Rundle) but becomes too involved with his work to devote himself to their relationship, leaving him a life of regrets. (As his namesake, St. Augustine, he comes to understand that he saw but through a glass darkly).
Back in the observatory, Augustine awakes to discover the stove on fire and a mute girl (Caoilinn Springall) who was left behind and is hiding in his shelter. The girl draws a picture of a flower for him indicating that her name is Iris. (Oddly, she never writes anything down.). Then, Augustine also discovers the are people out in space trying to contact his observatory. The crew of a spaceship that’s on its way home from a mission to explore that same planet he spoke of years before. He’s desperate to warn them to turn around.
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Together Augustine and Iris make a dangerous journey via snow mobile to another site with a more powerful antenna, and encounter everything from snowstorms to underwater immersion in ice to wild dogs, as Augustine struggles to keep himself and especially Iris safe. The script, based on the 2016 novel, Good Morning Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton, was adapted by Mark L. Smith, who did the script for Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s incident-jammed The Revenant.
Meanwhile, up in space, the five-person crew of the spaceship Aether are having their own issues, having lost contact with Earth. Mission specialist Sully (Jones) is pregnant with the child of the Aether’s commander, Captain Adewhol (Oyelowo). Fellow crewmembers include homesick pilot Tom (Chandler), navigator Sanchez (Demián Bichir) and the young engineer, Maya (Tiffany Boone).
Struggling with distance from their friends and families, they review old holographic video messages, banter a lot about what the baby’s name will be. The ship runs into a meteor shower and the outside of the ship, which resembles a macrame pasta shell sculpture, gets damaged. There’s a fatal injury — which is perversely beautiful and even educational — if you ever wondered how someone would bleed out in zero gravity.
Both the Arctic survival story and the spaceship drama are derivative, and while action sequences are well done in isolation, they never develop a convincing momentum. Clooney, who has starred in two superior space movies (Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity and Steven Soderberg’s Solaris) aims for a balance of adventure mystery and contemplation of the Big Void, then allows all that solemnity to slip into mush.
The Midnight Sky. Directed by George Clooney. Screenplay by Mark L. Smith. Starring George Clooney, Felicity Jones, David Oyelowo, Caoilinn Springall, Tiffany Boone, Demián Bichir, Kyle Chandler, Sophie Rundle and Ethan Peck. Begins streaming on Netflix December 23.