It’s that time of year when the studios put their best stuff out as potential Oscar bait, and that means a prestige drama or two that may or may not add up to much, but someone had high hopes on what may be a high concept sort of movie starring or directed by (or both) someone whose name is often in contention for various awards. Granted, we have a pandemic out right now, so some of those movies are going right to streaming.
All that means is Netflix recently dropped The Midnight Sky, a sci-fi drama starring and directed by George Clooney.
In the year 2049, something happened that made the Earth highly radioactive and leading to the death of, oh, everybody. It’s not really explained what happened, but the radiation didn’t get everywhere yet, and a group of scientists in the Arctic, where it’s temporarily still OK, is leaving a research station to die with their families save one man, Dr. Augustine Lofthouse (Clooney). He’s dying anyway of a serious illness, and he doesn’t really have a family of his own, so it makes no difference if he dies in the research station or somewhere else. He finds a small girl that was seemingly left behind, bit there’s a bigger problem on the horizon: there’s a spacecraft with a crew coming back to Earth after an extended expedition to one of Jupiter’s moons. Fearing the crew doesn’t know the Earth is no longer habitable, Augustine takes it upon himself to get to the strongest transmitter he can to warn them not to return before he dies.
Meanwhile, on the Aether, the five man crew has their own problems on the return trip. One member of the crew, Sully (Felicity Jones), is pregnant by another (David Oyelowo), but that’s not the problem so much as various mechanical failures and the crew wondering why no one back home seems to be trying to contact them for a routine check-in.
I find myself, and not for the first time this weekend, not really sure what to make of the movie. The cast gives good performances, and the final scene is a real gut punch on so many levels. In many ways, it’s got all the elements of a truly enjoyable flick. Why, then, didn’t it quite connect with me? To that end, I think it comes down to one of tonal whiplash. There’s a lot of plot in this movie, and while a lot of plot isn’t really a bad thing in the hands of a talented enough director, I am not sure Clooney is that talented. The last movie of his I saw was Suburbicon where he took an unproduced Coen Brothers dark comedy and smashed a blatant political commentary that wasn’t the slightest bit funny into it, ruining whatever potential the dark comedy portion had.
It isn’t as bad here, but there are multiple quiet scenes where there are moments of quiet character-building or even a bit of joy in such a dour movie when all of a sudden, without any kind of warning, something awful happens. The end result is a movie that feels too overstuffed, and that’s not even getting into Augustine’s flashbacks to his youth. Granted, many of those scenes turn out to be important, but the movie doesn’t really give itself a chance to breathe. There’s too much going on to really give the movie a chance to say what exactly it is trying to say. Clooney’s shows more capability behind the camera here, and there are some great scenes, but this movie might have done so much better in the hands of a better director.
I mean, Steven Spielberg or Christopher Nolan could have made this material really sing. Instead, Clooney got it to hum a bit and hit the occasional high note.
Grade: C
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