🍿#1: The Midnight Sky

The Midnight Sky Review

Dec 31, 2020

“As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a film critic.”
~ Goodfellas, 1990 (*…kind of*)

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Upcoming Releases

Don’t Tell a Soul | 15th January | Watch the trailer

Rainn Wilson (Dwight from The US Office) gets stuck down a hole and is left at the mercy of two brothers with very different ideas of what to do with him.

The Marksman | 15th January | Watch the trailer

Liam Neeson once again takes on the role of gun-toting hardman, this time rescuing a small boy from a Mexican cartel.

Fact of the week

George Clooney lost 30lbs for his role in The Midnight Sky and ended up in hospital with pancreatitis just four days into filming. You think he’d know better considering his previous roles…

Review: The Midnight Sky

Star rating:

2.5*

Worth a watch?

Yeah, sure.

Where to watch:

Netflix | Watch the trailer

Blurb:

It’s the end of the world. Augustine Lofthouse (George Clooney), a terminally ill scientist, makes a (somewhat) perilous journey across the Arctic with a lost girl (Caoilinn Springall) in an effort to warn a crew of astronauts that there is no home to come back to.

The film switches between these unlikely companions and the five astronauts returning to Earth, with the odd flashback to Augustine’s past.

Quick review (NO spoilers):

Based on the book Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton, The Midnight Sky (also directed by Clooney) doesn’t quite reach the stellar peak it’s aiming for.

The story is moderately compelling, but as it attempts to connect the audience with all of its characters it achieves the opposite effect—this lack of emotional resonance is the film’s downfall. Yes it’s well shot, yes the performances are good, and yes there’s some suspense. But without really caring for any of the characters, it all feels a bit pointless.

Critic’s cut 🚨SPOILER ALERT🚨:

I’ll tell you what I did like about the film, the plot twist—because I didn’t see it coming. And yet I couldn’t help but feel cheated.

At the beginning of the film, as people are evacuating the observatory, one woman is calling for her daughter. I should have noticed at the time that she was shouting “Anna”, not Iris…

It seemed to me that the way young Iris interacted with the world, and the way she was shown to us, was not in line with how imaginary characters should be portrayed (think Fight Club).

For example, when Clooney first finds Iris and she wonders to her sleeping bag on a shelf, there’s a child’s drawn picture next to her bed. Is this the work of another child pre-evacuation, or did he imagine that as well?

Maybe my ego was bruised for not seeing it coming, but something about it didn’t sit right with me.

I also struggled to accept Mitchell (Kyle Chandler) and Sanchez’s (Demián Bichir) suicide pact and how easily their decision was accepted by their fellow crew members. These four scientists are the last living humans in the universe, and they’re happy to cut the population in half? I don’t buy it.

A final point on this film. With all the baby names being suggested throughout the scenes set in space, I was surprised that adult Iris, AKA “Sully”, didn’t name her child after Maya—the woman whose drops of blood were floating around the ship. This small touch may have added a little more of the emotion that the film so badly needed.

Bonus Trivia: The film was rewritten to accommodate Felicity Jones getting pregnant in real life. Maybe that’s why less thought was put into the name of the baby…

In the next issue:

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom | Watch the Trailer

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