Film review: George Clooney becomes an unlikely father figure in The Midnight Sky
Ambitious sci-fi, post-apocalyptic tale loses its grip in the last quarter
George Clooney in The Midnight Sky (above); Tom Hanks and Helena Zengel in News of the World.
The Midnight Sky is streaming now on Netflix.
HOLLYWOOD MEGASTAR George Clooney sprouts a bushy grey beard in The Midnight Sky, playing against type as a loner forced into being a father figure. Refreshingly, the unprecocious child actor who plays opposite him easily holds her own.
Clooney, who also directs, is not his usual charming self as Augustine Lofthouse. With slumped shoulders and sunken eyes, his scientist stalks the empty cafeterias and observatories of a scientific outpost in the Arctic. It’s 2049, and his colleagues have frantically evacuated after a deadly radiation disaster ravages the entire planet. In the final stages of cancer, Lofthouse stays here alone—or so he thinks—to try to radio a spaceship headed back to Earth to warn it to turn around.
But then he finds someone else has been left behind, and the mute child Iris (played by a luminescent Caoilinn Springall) brings out the aloof scientist’s more nurturing instincts—though, thankfully, not entirely.
From here Clooney the director leaps between two worlds: Lofthouse and Iris’s attempt to trek across the blizzard-battered ice to a stronger radio tower and the spaceship, where a pregnant astronaut (Felicity Jones) and her crewmates struggle to reach anyone on Earth. Based on the book Good Morning, Midnight, it’s a captivating setup.
But in its second half, the film’s ambitions get away from it. The story jumps haphazardly between flashbacks to Lofthouse’s early career and random-feeling action sequences on Earth and in space. Think wolves and cracking ice in the Arctic, and meteor storms in the solar system—the latter a little too reminiscent of Clooney’s own Gravity.
In fact, a lot of the science-fiction pieces here feel derivative—from the search for the meaning of life in Interstellar to the lonely struggle of The Martian. It’s also hard not to think of Newt igniting the mothering instincts of Ellen Ripley in Aliens.
The mood is a downer and the last quarter stretches all plausibility, but Midnight Sky is set amid a cinematic spectacle you might be craving right now (save the white, scrolling latticework on a spaceship that looks like Space Odyssey 2001 as envisioned by Etsy makers). The blizzard action sequences—shot in 100-kilometre-per-hour winds at on an Icelandic glacier, no less—are arresting.
Even if Clooney the actor isn’t totally able to elevate the familiar material, he at least gives a valiant effort. Some of the best moments are the small, quiet ones, watching Clooney’s sick grump let his guard down with Iris; a pea fight is priceless.
Though this jaded guy stuck in an apocalyptic Arctic may think he’s saving a little girl, you gradually start to wonder if maybe it isn’t the other way around.
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