In days of yore, when “opening night” meant something other than a movie’s initial arrival in one’s Netflix queue, I would have gotten dressed and driven into town to see The Midnight Sky, a new sci-fi thriller based on the novel Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton. On Christmas Eve, I merely pressed a button. Though the latter feels dismayingly incommensurate to the exertion required to create large-scale feature films, it represents the exact amount of effort one should expend in pursuit of the streaming giant’s latest stinker.
The seventh film from actor-turned-director George Clooney and the follow-up to 2017’s disastrous Suburbicon, The Midnight Sky tells the parallel stories of an Arctic scientist and a homebound spaceship crew. Augustine Lofthouse (Clooney) is a dying astronomer who has spent his career searching for habitable worlds. One of these planets, K-23, has just received a promising visit from the spacecraft Aether. When an undescribed “event” wipes out the vast majority of life on Earth, Lofthouse must find a way to contact the Aether and convince its astronauts to turn their ship around. Accompanied by Iris (Caoilinn Springall), an unspeaking 7-year-old who has been left behind in the rush to evacuate the research station, Lofthouse sets out on a journey that will determine the fate of the human species.
That the team aboard the Aether remain ignorant of Earth’s calamity for more than half the movie goes a long way toward explaining The Midnight Sky’s painfully disjointed tone. Ensconced in the relative comfort of their vessel, the crew of the returning spacecraft lift weights, play video games, and conduct the occasional interstellar affair. For commander Adewole (David Oyelowo) and Dr. “Sully” Sullivan (Felicity Jones), the fruit of shipbound boredom is an unexpected pregnancy, a turn of events that provides a subject for much onboard joshing. For the other astronauts, among them Kyle Chandler’s folksy pilot Mitchell, nothing so interesting is happening, yet a spirit of bland good humor nevertheless persists.
In ideal circumstances, a movie with entirely separate “A” and “B” plots would take care to give each narrative its own source of propulsion. The Midnight Sky, alas, is unable to keep both engines firing at once. Though Clooney’s performance as Lofthouse is among the most charmless of the actor’s long career, the scientist’s trek across the ice in pursuit of a working antenna is at least occasionally compelling. (Aiding tremendously is the presence of Springall, whose expressive Iris is one of the film’s few saving graces.) Far less interesting is the saga of the Aether, which remains tedious even when that ship experiences its own inevitable emergencies. In part, the blame for this imbalance lies with the movie’s poor character development: The Aether’s inhabitants are uninspiringly cast and given little in the way of backstory. The bigger problem, however, is that the Aether’s plot feels consistently like filler. Strapped with a malfunctioning communication system, for instance, the spaceship’s crew attempt what is clearly meant to be a show-stopping spacewalk. Yet what is such a scene but padding when the audience already knows the message that the astronauts are straining so mightily to hear?
Viewed in the context of Clooney’s broader career, The Midnight Sky is the third and least satisfying work in a space triptych that includes 2002’s Solaris and 2013’s Gravity. Though both films boast superior performances by their leading man, it is the direction of Steven Soderbergh and Alfonso Cuaron, respectively, that provides the sharpest counterpoint. An adaptation of the 1961 novel by Stanislaw Lem (and a remake of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 masterpiece of the same name), Soderbergh’s Solaris is a sci-fi drama of delicate lyricism, a cerebral tour de force that includes what is surely the most stirring use of a Dylan Thomas poem in all of cinema. A crowd-pleaser as well as a visual marvel, Cuaron’s Gravity marries technical wizardry to a story so simple, a child could grasp it. The Midnight Sky, inferior in both design and execution, sits alongside such siblings like a misshapen gnome. One can feel Clooney grappling with his cumbersome double plot, but he never manages to turn the pieces into anything worth watching.
As is often the way of such things, it is in the picture’s most obvious reach for depth that its greatest failure occurs. Without spoiling the ending, I will simply say that the astute viewer’s suspicions about Iris’s true identity turn out to be wholly justified, and the resulting “reveal” is as groan-inducing as it is nonsensical. Contrary to what it supposes, The Midnight Sky has very little to say about memory, reality, and the nature of the self. It is, instead, a case study in the perils of “gotcha” filmmaking. As a substitute for what actually transpires, I, for one, would have preferred the death of every last human being.
A polar dystopia with intermittent spaceship asides, The Midnight Sky is The Revenant by way of Star Trek by way of The Sixth Sense, with all of the muddledness that that combination implies. It didn’t quite ruin my holiday season, but no one can say it didn’t try.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
