This 2020 sci-fi flick directed by George Clooney and also starring George Clooney is all about Clooney trying to get to a satellite station in the arctic to alert an incoming pack of astronauts against landing on earth. Because the earth is effed.
“A lone scientist in the Arctic races to contact a crew of astronauts returning home to a mysterious global catastrophe” reads the online description of the film. And that’s the annoying bit about this production – the viewer is never told what exactly happened, although we are made to understand that the atmosphere is no longer sustainable for life. Remind anyone of Interstellar? Both films share the same dominant themes – a dying earth, hunt for a new planet & father-daughter relationships.
Anyway… the movie is beautifully shot, it has an eerie perfection to it. The blue tones throughout the course of the story are very striking, especially for people who love the shade, and while it has a calming effect, the mood turns eventually turns very blue too. What I am trying to say is that ‘The Midnight Sky’ gets slow and depressing pretty quickly.
There are unnecessary emotional flashbacks to establish how Clooney’s character Augustine Lofthouse is a passionate scientist who has found a habitable planet that could be an alternative to earth. In-fact, the team of scientists he is trying to warn are coming back from the very same planet that is very close to Jupiter.
Since I am no science-whiz, there are no scientific loopholes that I could spot, so nothing to complain about there. Everything seemed pretty convincing to me, it just wasn’t gripping. The stunning view of the arctic sky is not enough to captivate us, neither is the surreal nature of a new planet. There are some small twists in the end that do not come as a surprise and the climax was quite unsatisfactory. You do not get closure.
All we know is that a white lady astronaut and her black astronaut boyfriend are going to possibly be the equivalent of Adam and Eve in a new planet, while the earth perishes.