The Midnight Sky

Given that: 1) there are several films coming out over the next week, 2) it's the holidays, and 3) I'm working on the Rath Awards (yes, they're happening!) I'm going to keep most of these last 2020 reviews on the shorter side.

I'm a huge fan of space exploration, but more the idea vs. the actual practice. For example, watching a space shuttle take off or a movie about NASA astronauts going to the moon...that's not what really gets me going even though I'd still enjoy those stories. 

What really inspires me is mankind's next step. What will it look like? Who will be that person to execute it? Will it be bred out of fear (e.g. we must leave our planet because it's dying) or hope (e.g. let's colonize another planet while also remaining on earth). There are times where I literally cannot stop thinking about these things and I both love and am terrified by the "bigness" of them. Thinking about it for too long can make you feel infinitesimally small. 

This is part of the reason I've come to love Interstellar so damn much. Its story is exactly what I'm talking about when I ask those questions and I find so much inspiration from that film's concepts (and a lot more from Hans Zimmer's thunderous score) that it's a wonder I'm not working on a space exploration novel.

I found a lot of inspiration in the concepts of The Midnight Sky too, but the key difference here is that it's just not a very captivating film. The places it goes and outcomes it suggests were enough for me to jot down some notes in my "Writing Inspiration" OneNote, but I also struggled to pay attention to this film during the middle. 

Directed by George Clooney and premiering on Netflix these holidays, The Midnight Sky reflects yet another Netflix movie that fulfills this statement: "It feels like all the pieces are here to make a great movie, but it ends up missing...something." It's becoming all too familiar and, sure, the argument could be made that the special "something" is the theater experience, but I've also seen enough other Netflix films that are stupendous to know better. 

"Do you think this will go better for you than Rogue One did?"

"I just miss bein Batman, ya know?"

The Midnight Sky starts us off by throwing us into the thick of the story. Clooney's Augustine is left alone at a research base as the rest of the world undergoes some crisis. He comes to discover that there's still one space mission active and must travel north to boost his signal to contact them. Meanwhile, he finds that a girl has stowed away, leaving him to take care of her. In space, the crew had been researching a new moon discovered by Jupiter that could sustain human life. That's all I'll give you because the rest would be spoilers, but know that my criticism doesn't come from the story - by the end I found I really enjoyed that element - but rather that it focuses on the wrong things. For example, we're not told what the crisis on the rest of the planet is at all, just that it's deadly. To a certain extent, we don't even know if everyone is dead and Augustine is the last man on earth. Spending even 5 minutes to explain this could have upped the stakes for both groups and added clarity where it felt frustrating there was none. Secondly, we spend too much time with Augustine and Iris (child actor, Caoilinn Springhall) as they do fairly mundane things like eat food and walk across barren snow drifts together. There's a lack of urgency in the film, at least to the degree I would expect to find given the premise. The film should have felt like a ticking clock, moving perpetually forward, like our characters backs are up against the wall. Instead it felt more like, "Yeah, we'll get to it. But first..."

This is particularly evident in the middle where a lot of stuff just happens but doesn't really supply the bookends of the movie with anything that matters. I loved the ending and it's where I felt The Midnight Sky got closest to what I wanted it to be, but the middle is where it spends too much time with Clooney getting more and more snow packed on his beard versus in space. And even the in space stuff - while interesting and at times exciting - felt somewhat hollow. 

I'll probably like The Midnight Sky more than most, simply because it got me thinking and the overall plot is very interesting to me. Others will find it a bit of a slog - but a pretty one - and if space exploration or "mankind's first step" isn't their thing, The Midnight Sky won't be either. 

CONS

• Spends too much time with Clooney and is probably too long overall. The middle drags
• The original score could have been much better. It's useless in most scenes and only inspirational in a couple
• More details about the rest of the world + a greater sense of urgency would have made this more exciting, like there was a clock to battle 

PROS

• Clooney, Felicity Jones, David Oyelowo and the rest of the cast do well. It almost feels like too many big names, but it works
• I loved the story and the ending. It's both intimate and epic (even if the film struggles to capture the "epic" part)
• Most of the special effects are really well done
• Great cinematography
• Concepts that inspire me!

Rath's Review Score | 6.5/10