OVP: The Midnight Sky (2020)

Film: The Midnight Sky (2020)

Stars: George Clooney, Felicity Jones, David Oyelowo, Tiffany Boone, Demian Bichir, Kyle Chandler

Director: George Clooney

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Visual Effects)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

I hate to make everything about Covid & the annus horribilis we have all just endured, but it's impossible to watch movies, particularly films like The Midnight Sky, without thinking about how we saw them.  The Midnight Sky is a Netflix film, but it was originally intended to be screened in theaters, and was even shot on a specific type of 65mm camera so that it would play well on an IMAX screen.  This isn't how we're going to see this, and while there are movies like Soul or Tenet that might eventually get re-releases in theaters in the future for retro screenings, Midnight Sky is not important enough to get such a distinction.  As a result, as you'll see, it's hard for me to fully grasp director George Clooney's message here, since I didn't get to see it the way that he intended, and in an era where people will not always see a movie the way the filmmaker intended, how do we acknowledge this gap?

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place in the days after a cataclysmic event, one that has slowly started to make the planet inhospitable.  Augustine (Clooney), a chief scientist in the Arctic, stays behind to communicate with manned space missions, warning the people on them to stay in space, and he eventually comes in contact with a craft named the Aether, communicating with Sully (Jones), a pregnant astronaut who has been on a hospitable moon of Jupiter.  While he's contacting her, Augustine encounters a young girl who cannot speak & has been left behind.  The two of them venture forth, fighting the cold, trying to stave off the cataclysm while properly helping the Aether reverse cold.  As the film ends, we understand that this young girl is not real, but a figment of his imagination of the daughter he abandoned, and that Sully is the daughter that he abandoned, and thus by venturing forth into the wilderness (and eventually dying), Augustine has finally given a part of himself to his daughter.

This is exactly the kind of movie I love.  I am a big fan of prestige SciFi dramas, I adore adventure epics, and I love movies so directly plotted like this (where we understand quickly the big stakes, and there will be sacrifices that will need to be made to achieve them).  Which is why I was so bummed this didn't work out.  Clooney is hit-or-miss for me as a director (Good Night, and Good Luck being the one movie of his that I loved, and also the most atypical of his films), and he doesn't give this movie gravitas-there's not enough balance in getting to know either Augustine or Sully on a significant level (from a story perspective it would've been smarter to make one of them the sole lead, rather than alternating back-and-forth), and as a result neither story feels properly complete.  This isn't a bad movie, but it pales in comparison to other films like Gravity, First Man, and Ad Astra, amongst the best of the last decade, which it is clearly trying to compete with.  I'm going with 2-stars because it doesn't succeed, but this is right between 2 and 3 stars, and if you like this kind of film I would recommend checking it out.

The effects are interesting, and honestly part of me wonders if I'd have given this a 3-star rating if I'd seen it properly on a big screen.  The Jupiter's moon sequence is a glorious invasion of color, and there's one fantastic scene involving Tiffany Boone's Maya as she understands she's been injured, with a drip, drip, drip of blood floating in particles in space that is harrowing & the best-constructed action scene in the movie.  It will probably receive a few Oscar nominations with limited competition, but you have to wonder if it might've deserved them even in a normal year, as the production design and effects work is seamless.