Augustine (George Clooney) has every reason to think he’s alone in his Antarctic observatory until one day, he sees a bowl of cereal already on the table he was about to set. Old and forgetful? Later, when he extinguishes a kitchen stove fire, the supper from a fry pan he had forgotten, he knows he’s losing his memory or his mind. And then he spots a shy little seven-year old girl (Caoilinn Springall) huddled under the counter… that must have been her cereal bowl?
The Midnight Sky became one of the world’s most watched films when it debuted late last year on Netflix, but while it raises a few interesting ideas, the science-fiction drama falls are short of 2020’s best pictures. The reasons for so much interest in The Midnight Sky go beyond a chance to watch Clooney play against his suave image. Here, he looks like a flannel-shirted survivalist in a high-tech cabin—a flustered aging man with a terminal illness, crumbling into surliness as he summons his instinct to live.
The main thing in The Midnight Sky is that the Earth succumbs to a sudden environmental catastrophe, left unexplained but which may have swept away most of humanity in a tidal wave of death. For some reason Augustine remains alive in Antarctica—just him and the mysterious little girl called Iris. Perhaps the only other remaining people are the crew of the Aether, a deep space probe returning from an unknown moon of Jupiter, a beautiful habitable planet with oxygen and a purply sky.
Although it wasn’t produced with this in mind, The Midnight Sky has become an allegory of COVID isolation and the sometimes testy interactions within our bubbles as well as the troubling awareness that everyday life can suddenly end. At the story’s heart is an Elon Musk dream of colonizing a new world.
It’s an intriguing premise poorly handled. Clooney has always been better in front of the camera than behind it, and he directs the adaptation from Lily Brooks-Dalton’s novel with seen-it-before lack of imagination and stock Hollywood action scenes to break the trudging monotony. The musical score should be banned for high saccharine content. A spacewalk set to this sentimental dreck? It sure lacks the majesty of 2001: A Space Odyssey. But the film has one outstanding scene with Augustine and Iris lost in a blinding blizzard. He calls to her from the whirlpool of white, begging her to find him by the sound of his voice above the wind.
And then there is the role playing from the Aether’s competent crew of familiar faces (including Felicity Jones and David Oyelowo) who prove unable to expand their characters beyond one dimension. The Midnight Sky’s best acting comes from the child playing the happy yet strangely mute girl with lively, determined eyes.
