Midnight feast for space junkies
The Midnight Sky (M, 118 mins) Directed by George Clooney Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★ 1⁄ 2
Ithink a lot – probably too much – about the shared language of film. The way that we have become so used to certain constructs that we ‘‘know’’ how things will turn out and more-or-less exactly how creatures and machines that have never existed, should look and behave.
Which is why you are familiar with the design of a spaceship built to take us to other planets, because that design has been a part of our shared experience for decades now.
We know because Arthur C Clarke and Stanley Kubrick showed us back in 1968 that the spaceship must be a long cylinder, with living quarters at one end, the engines at the other and insectoid appendages for the communications equipment.
It was a design that was picked up by Douglas Trumbull – who worked on 2001 – a couple of years later for his immortal Silent Running and which has continued to be all the shorthand any moviegoer needs to identify exactly what we are seeing on the screen. Which isn’t bad, for a ship that has never existed and which won’t for another few generations at least.
All of which went through my head a few scenes into The Midnight Sky, a film in which George Clooney stars and also takes one of his infrequent spins in the director’s chair.
Clooney plays a scientist, dying of something unspecified, but phlegmy, alone at a base deep inside the Arctic Circle.
Everyone else has been evacuated, perhaps to underground bunkers, in the aftermath of some global catastrophe known only as ‘‘The Event’’.
The year is 2049. Also, hilariously, ‘‘February’’, which is as redundant as it seems.
As The Midnight Sky nears its end, we do learn what The Event was. And when I was told, I wondered exactly why Clooney had bothered to keep it quiet.
Like so much else here, it seems important. But it really means nothing.
Somewhere in the skies between Earth and Jupiter, amassive spaceship is coming home. The Aether has been away for two years, laying the groundwork for colonisation of a newly discovered moon of Jupiter.
But, with the Earth now unsurvivable, it’s up to Clooney to get across the snowy wastes to a Norwegian weather station that’ll have the necessary radio to warn the crew not to land.
Which raises a lot of questions, none very well answered. Why would a weather station have a better radio than a lavishly equipped scientific base?
Wouldn’t Nasa or whoever have just recorded a message and left it playing? And, where the hell did this adorable and apparently mute 7-year-old girl suddenly appear from?
Clooney is happy to cherry-pick ideas and scenes from other, often better, films than this.
There’s something of Arrival about the film’s musings on birth, death and mortality, while The Road is close at hand as the scientist and wee Iris venture outside. And Clooney’s own time on Gravity clearly informed a couple of key scenes in and around the spaceship.
And yet, The Midnight Sky mostly holds together and keeps us on its side. Clooney’s own performance is made of exactly the likeably avuncular gruffness he has been trying on for the past halfdecade or so.
On the spaceship, Felicity Jones, David Oyelowo, Demian Bichir, Kyle Chandler and – especially – Tiffany Boone ( Hunters) are all more than fine, with some chemistry and apparent affection making the most of the thinly written dialogue. A bit of banter between Chandler and Bichir over an old Neil Diamond track was maybe my favourite moment of the entire film.
Like its starring spaceship, The Midnight Sky is a film assembled from parts we are familiar with. But, there’s heart and decency here, as well as a couple of setpieces that pay their way.
On Netflix in a couple of weeks, The Midnight Sky will be OK. But if you really want to see it, then make the effort to get to a real screen.
The Midnight Sky is screening in select cinemas now and will debut on Netflix on December 23.