Scientist Augustine Lofthouse (George Clooney) has spent his life trying to find inhabitable worlds where humanity could survive.
Cut off from all former relationships, he lives a lonely existence with his work.
But now Lofthouse is dying.
And the world he has spent his life trying to escape is following suit - an unknown catastrophe has wiped out most of the human race, leaving Lofthouse isolated at a weather station in the Arctic circle.
Lofthouse is content - until he discovers a young child, Iris (Caoilinn Springall), hiding at the installation, and discovers one of his expeditionary crews is on its way back to earth.
Unable to warn this ship, Lofthouse has to make the decision to head out into the snow and trek to another station with a more powerful transmitter.
At the same time, he has to maintain his health and ensure Iris’s safety…
This miniseries might have been a bad idea.
I like to pick a grouping of films that would generally not get covered.
Sadly, this run has been something of a dud.
It’s not that Clooney’s failures are that extreme - it is that, aside from a few instances, his directorial career is just kind of dull.
The Midnight Sky was released at the end of 2020 on Netflix, a casualty of the pandemic.
Clooney was now a father and firmly embedded in the elder statesman stage of his stardom - he could afford to do only projects that he was passionate about, and he took four years off.
The previous year, he had shepherded a new miniseries adapted from Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. Clooney produced, directed a few episodes, and appeared in a small supporting role. After a couple of directorial whiffs, it was a sizable success, and marked Clooney’s shift to streaming for his projects.
It is a little strange for The Midnight Sky because the film is easily Clooney’s biggest film, in terms of its scope and scale.
It also charts a potential path forward for Clooney the filmmaker, but more on that later.
The skeleton of The Midnight Sky is familiar - a central character is forced out of their bubble to go on a quest that leads them to reconnect with life.
The Midnight Sky is a survivalist drama with a sci-fi skin - while it features some impressive CGI and a couple of setpieces, this is primarily a small-scale drama about regret and trying to make up for lost time.
Once Clooney and Springall are on the ice, the film is also a pretty solid thriller - there is nothing particularly original about their journey (including a twist which is sadly easy to predict).
When the movie is about Clooney’s character learning to care for a child and make his last moments count, The Midnight Sky is effective.
Sadly, it falls victim to the same bloat as Clooney’s previous ventures.
First there are the flashbacks to a younger Augustine - thankfully Clooney does not use de-ageing technology for these scenes (the character is played by current Spock Ethan Peck), but disconcertingly, he does dub the younger actor, which undermines the scenes.
These scenes are supposed to have a cumulative effect - showing a past relationship that Augustine regrets - but they only provide information, rather than an emotional context.
Aside from these flashbacks, the film also cuts away to the crew in space - played by Felicity Jones, David Oyelowo, Tiffany Boone, Demián Bichir and Kyle Chandler.
The crew’s subplot takes up a big chunk of the runtime, and it proves somewhat detrimental to the movie.
The crew’s essential problem is trying to contact Earth, but aside from that plot, there is no emotional spine like Augustine’s story, and these scenes start to feel drawn out.
And because of how long these scenes are, it starts to feel like jumping between two movies.
It is the latest example of Clooney’s inability to refine storylines and ideas, but it is considerably better realised than most of his previous directorial efforts. This is one Clooney movie where a judicious edit - at the adaptation level - might have helped.
The movie is at its best during the setpieces, when it is just about characters trying to deal with literal obstacles: Augustine and Iris trying to escape the sinking container on the ice; the wave of debris that hits the spaceship during the crew’s spacewalk. There is a functionality and sense of suspense here that feels more alive and energised than anything else in the movie.
I left the movie thinking Clooney should drop his pretensions and shift his focus to potboilers, a crime movie or an action flick.
There are so many scenes in this movie where you can feel the film striving to move the viewer - I am not saying it is wholly unsuccessful, but the character and his plight are never dealt with in a way that feels as specific or layered as it should.
The finale is meant to ring with a sense of Augustine’s loss and accomplishment (in saving and meeting his daughter), but I left the movie oddly unmoved.
Despite its good qualities, it feels like Clooney the director is running in place, unable to delineate between the films he wants to make, and the films he has the skill set to realise.
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