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The Midnight Sky Envisions the Worlds’ End with Pathos But Little Grace


The Midnight Sky kills in its last ten minutes. The culmination of the films’ emotional throughline and ultimate recontextualization of the meaning of its narrative is immensely powerful, as grim as it may be as well. And it’s not even that unpredictable or inspired, it all comes down to how it’s executed, and it may be one of George Clooney’s brightest moments as a director -as well as an actor. If the rest of the movie that preceded it had been so strong, so invested, it might have been one of my favourite movies of the year.
In 2020/2021, The Midnight Sky is not a very comfortable movie, dealing so viscerally as it does with the end of human civilization on Earth. And yet it’s apparently been performing very well on Netflix since it was dropped there last week. Perhaps we are too connected to the idea of doom in this moment in time, or the possibility for hope, which is also in The Midnight Sky, faint though it may be. In some ways it seems to be George Clooney’s attempt at an Interstellar or Gravity (which of course he himself was in), as his last film, Suburbicon was an attempt at a Coen Brothers movie (which of course he hired them to co-write): his grand, realist science-fiction drama about the future of humanity on a dying world, equal parts deadly warning and message of assurance. But like Suburbicon, it more often than not feels like an impersonation of what it wants to be than the thing it’s actually going for. And the dreariness really doesn’t help matters.
Taking the extremely bleak view that everything will end by 2049, the film is set in a world devastated by an unspecified apocalypse. Radiation in the atmosphere has made the Earth’s surface borderline uninhabitable, the only chance for survival appears to be this one spacecraft returning from a newly discovered livable planet, unaware of what has transpired back home. The mission of Clooney’s Augustine, a dying scientist who’d founded that world, is to warn the space travelers off from his isolated Arctic base.
Clooney himself is one of the more striking things about the movie; hidden behind an unkempt beard and a shaved head, it’s certainly one of his more physically transformative performances. He’s a solemn hermit dwelling in regret and fading faith, and Clooney really leans into that sadness, but not enough so that he just mopes for two hours. In fact its’ the sincerity of his drive to save the hapless astronauts that gives his journey, both physical and psychological, its’ weight. He spends much of the film trying to get to another base with a stronger satellite signal, accompanied by a mute girl (Caoilinn Springall) seemingly abandoned by her caretakers. Such a dynamic is well-trodden territory at this point in film history, but the interesting thing about it here is the way in which its’ muted and underdeveloped. There’s a reason behind this that’s actually rather smart.
Interspersed throughout this are flashbacks that provide glimpses into Augustine’s life and work, and how his obsessions with the latter drove away his wife and a child he never got to meet. There’s even a scene that seems directly lifted from the equivalent beat in A Christmas Carol, where his dejected partner comes to him while working to explain his own values to him and break up. And it plays out as pretty trite and unconvincing, the overarching thoughtfulness that characterizes the rest of his journey, and is honestly quite effective, is absent in these scenes. There’s a necessity to them and it might be how they’re edited in, but they don’t gel quite so well with the personal journey in the central narrative.
And speaking of the editing as pertaining to parallel storylines, we’ve got to address the Æther, the spacecraft which takes up about as much screen-time as Augustine’s thread. There’s not a lot of rationale to dedicate so much time to the five-person crews’ ignorant journey home that is in large part utterly disconnected from Augustine’s arguably more pressing narrative, and uneventful until the last act. It’s a neat looking environment, a lot of work went into the geography and its rules, and the cast here, which includes Tiffany Boone, Kyle Chandler, and Demián Bichir, is pretty good. The point seems to be to show us some vestige of humanity still living without the gloom of apocalypse, looking forward to returning home, the promise of new life in the pregnancy of our point of view character, played by Felicity Jones, contrasted with the ending of life in the other story. There are slight thematic mirrors, but this side nonetheless feels a little empty. Though he makes for a very good captain, there’s little romantic chemistry between David Oyelewo and Jones, and an intended paternal relationship is communicated poorly as well. Clooney dwells too often in this part of the story, giving it the big and overlong Gravity-style suspenseful disaster sequence that ought to be reserved for his own character, and it ultimately doesn’t amount to a whole lot, either narratively or emotionally.
At last when the two storylines do meet and link up (that is apart from one scene earlier that very cleverly plays on the differing points in time these stories are taking place across -providing an ending to a plot point long before it is raised), their connectedness comes together in an incredibly literal way. And again, it does work, but doesn’t seem to have necessitated the focus and pacing issues that led there.
There’s some very nice cinematography though -Clooney intended this to be shown on IMAX screens, having had Martin Ruhe shoot it with specialty Arri Alexa cameras, and I definitely wish I could have seen it in that format rather than on a simple TV screen. There’s a bigness to the film that demands your whole field of vision. And especially towards the end, there are just some sublime shots! Also in spite of featuring one of the most overused needle-drops in “Sweet Caroline”, Alexandre Desplat’s score is really quite atmospheric and moving.
The Midnight Sky is based on a book by Lily Brooks-Dalton called Good Morning, Midnight, which seems to be about a number of things absent or underrepresented in the film, including gender and climate. The film however does have some interesting ideas of its own, stirring subtextual comments on regret and apocalypse -although it’s not the first by any means to touch on them in this way. The Midnight Sky is not a particularly good movie, but I think it is worth more than a passing glance. For even on a cloudy night sometimes a star can shine through.

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