The Midnight Sky ( 12A)
Soul ( PG)
As the lead director of Monsters Inc, Up and Inside Out, Pete Docter has emerged as the most visionary of the pioneering animation studio’s filmmakers, always willing to push the conceptual and intellectual bounds of what’s possible in a mainstream family movie. His latest, Soul, is no different. Co- directed by Kemp Powers, who also co- wrote the script with Docter and Mike Jones, it takes big themes – what happens when you die? What makes us who we are? What constitutes a full life? – and finds innovative, surprising and, as ever, emotionally true ways to explore them.
It’s built around a jazz pianist called Joe who’s reluctance to give up his dream of playing professionally and settle for a steady gig teaching music to primary school kids at first makes the film seem fairly rote. But the film quickly elevates this seemingly stock character to another realm, firstly by casting Jamie Foxx, whose sublime vocal performance riffs on his Oscarwinning turn in Ray, particularly in the way he captures the lost- in- music bliss Joe experiences whenever he’s playing.
With that part nailed, the film is free to take the first of several conceptual leaps, bumping off Joe en route to a potentially life- changing gig and condemning his soul to an afterlife of which he wants no part.
Dedicating himself to actively escaping, he bluffs his way into a job mentoring a recalcitrant, yet- to- beborn soul called 22 ( voiced by Tina Fey) and using this gig to cheat his way back onto Earth in ways too convoluted to explain here. What’s important is that 22’ s soul ends up in Joe’s comatose body and Joe ends up in the therapy cat that hospital staff have left on his bed. Delightful bodyswap shenanigans duly ensue as Joe tries to guide 22 across New York in time to play the aforementioned gig – and yet nothing that follows
is exactly ordinary. Buoyed by Jon Batiste’s jazzy score in the New York scenes and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s haunting electro score for the other- worldly scenes, its deeper resonances hit you in a way great art often does: unexpectedly and with a force that’s sometimes difficult to explain.
George Clooney’s seventh film, The Midnight Sky, about a terminally ill astrophysicist ( played by Clooney) trying to warn a crew of deepspace astronauts not to return to Earth following an environmental catastrophe is a mishmash of scifi clichés with a twist M Night Shyamalan might reject as too hokey.
That it starts off promisingly enough as early scenes see a bearded, emotionally hollow Clooney stumble around a newly evacuated Arctic substation scanning the radars for signs of life from a years- long research mission to a potentially habitable moon of Jupiter that his character, Augustine, discovered as a younger man. Almost immediately, though, Clooney feels the need to over- egg proceedings with moodbreaking flashbacks detailing the love Augustine has sacrificed in pursuit of his career.
It doesn’t help that Clooney opts against using digital trickery to play his younger self, instead casting Ethan Peck, who’s no ER- era George Clooney. Thenceforth, the film drifts into a more spectacle- laden affair as the action cuts drearily between the aforementioned mission – led by Felicity Jones’s pregnant astronaut – and Augustine’s survival- moviestyle quest to reach a working satellite in order to warn them not to return.
Though Clooney was clearly taking notes from Alfonso Cuarón on the set of Gravity, his cosmic set pieces just feel like inferior echoes of that film’s big moments and the final twist is jaw- dropping only in how brazenly the film uses it to deliver an emotional payoff it doesn’t come close to earning.
Soul is Streaming on Disney+;
The Midnight Sky is on Netflix