SILENT KNIGHT
Clooney illuminates the quiet space between words in The Midnight Sky
Much of the science-fiction genre is devoted to noisy robots and laser battles, and there's nothing wrong with that. I like my Terminators, Mad Maxes, Edges of Tomorrow and Matrixes as much as the next fan. But there exists alongside those shoot-'em-ups a more meditative strain of sci-fi. Silence fiction, if you will. Think of WALL-E endlessly tidying a deserted Earth, Sam Rockwell on a lonely lunar outpost in Moon, or the taciturn crew of Discovery in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The Midnight Sky, based on the excellent 2016 novel Good Morning, Midnight, by Lily Brooks-dalton, is very much in this quieter realm. A cataclysm has befallen the Earth, though whether pandemic or war, catastrophe natural or humanwrought, is never made clear. To some extent, it doesn't matter. The last two human survivors on the planet, as far as we can tell, are an astronomer and a little girl at an observatory in the High Arctic.
George Clooney has been to space twice in the movies, first in the cerebral 2002 remake of Solaris, then the somewhat faster paced 2013 film Gravity alongside Sandra Bullock. He's earthbound in this one, communicating via radio with the crew of a spaceship returning from Jupiter. But he's also behind the camera as director, so even in the space scenes, he's there.
As Augustine, a lonely astronomer pottering about in the deserted (and fictional) Barbeau Observatory in 2049, Clooney looks a good deal older than his 59 years. At first it seems he's the sole remaining inhabitant — everyone else headed south when the mysterious “event” took place three weeks earlier. But one morning he notices a half-eaten bowl of cereal and then a little girl (Caoilinn Springall), who's been hiding in the vast installation. She makes it known that her name is Iris, but doesn't speak. Meanwhile, out past the orbit of Mars, the spaceship Aether is on its way back from Jupiter, having discovered a hitherto unknown, habitable moon circling the gas giant.
“Why is it so quiet?” Commander Adewole (David Oyelowo) asks of the radio silence from Earth. None of the crew — Sully (Felicity Jones), Mitchell (Kyle Chandler), Sanchez (Demián Bichir) or Maya (Tiffany Boone) — can explain it.
Augustine and Iris are eking out an existence at the observatory, but he decides they need to travel to another, bigger radio telescope nearby, the better to contact the Aether. This quest adds some adventure to the plot, while out in space, a wrecked communications antenna requires a risky spacewalk to fix it. The twin worlds of spacecraft and observatory, outposts in desolate regions where technology is required for survival, also feature several subtle parallels in layout and design.
But what's truly amazing about The Midnight Sky is how quiet it is. Long stretches go by with little or no dialogue, thanks to a beautifully sparse adaptation by Mark L. Smith (The Revenant). A scene in a downed airplane, the pilot dead and a passenger nearly frozen, contains exactly nine words and is one of the most affecting scenes in a movie this year.
The film is far from silent, however. Those spaces amid the dialogue are filled with a fantastic and moving score from Alexandre Desplat. The French composer has two Academy Awards (for The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Shape of Water), and nine more nominations stretching back to The Queen in 2006. I was knocked over by his work on 2008's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, but this one, by turns sombre and playful, is easily its equal.
There is a strong undertow of melancholy in The Midnight Sky. We see one character aboard the Aether watching On the Beach, another all-star movie about a group of people observing the end of the world from the ends of the Earth. The astronauts also have access to VR recordings of familiar family scenes they've left behind and may never experience again. (As we Zoom our way through the pandemic, we in the real world can commiserate.)
Meanwhile, Clooney's character sometimes slips into rueful reverie, recalling mistakes he made in matters of the heart decades ago. Ethan Peck plays a convincing young Clooney, aided by digital trickery to help mimic his unmistakable voice in these flashback scenes.
But the film, much like the novel — though it departs from it in several ways — ably balances tidings of gloom with a current of hope. (Case in point; Sully, like the actor plating her, is pregnant.) Redemption may seem like it's over the horizon, but if we strike out for it and don't falter, there's a chance we might reach it.
I was discussing the film with another critic who regularly shares my views, and was surprised to find him less ecstatic about The Midnight Sky. So a caveat: There are a few scientific blunders, including a character who falls into an Arctic lake and swims through it as though in a heated pool. And just to be clear, if Jupiter had another planet-sized moon, Galileo would have spotted it 411 years ago next month, when he found the other four.
But that's part of the fiction in science fiction. Nitpicking aside, Clooney heads a stellar cast of characters that ably demonstrates the human desire to explore, discover and learn. The realms they pierce are as distant as the moons of Jupiter, and as close as a second heart beating inside you.