Rating: 3 out of 5 Aurora Borealises
The Midnight Sky opens on a familiar scene here in America, an old man shuffling around in his slippers, playing chess with himself, eating porridge, and drinking whiskey. Augustine Lofthouse is on lockdown. The only difference between him and me is that he has an important job to do: get on the radio and tell a ship full of astronauts returning to Earth that the avocado has gone off. Humans have triggered a catastrophe and rendered the planet uninhabitable. The party is over so don’t bother putting on pants.
The ship he’s trying to telephone, the Aether, crewed by Felicity Jones, David Oyelowo, Kyle Chandler, Demián Bichir, and Tiffany Boone, is on the home stretch of a round trip to Jupiter and that comes with its own set of headaches. Old Augustine, played by George Clooney, gets some company when he finds a little girl in a cabinet who has been left behind at the station. Serves her right for hiding in that cabinet.
In a series of flashbacks, we learn why they selected this terminally ill geezer to be humanity’s last hope and meet Ethan Peck as the young Augustine Lofthouse. I was 90% sure they’d swapped out Peck’s voice for the real George so I kept rewinding, inching closer to the television, even listening to some of The Midnight Sky on headphones. If you want to play this game at home, here’s a video of Ethan Peck reading Too Many Tribbles for comparison. And here’s Entertainment Weekly with the answer.
The cast of The Midnight Sky is decent. Clooney, perhaps worn out from also directing, keeps it pretty low key. Inaudibly low at times. Speak up, George! The whole point of this movie is you communicating, so communicate. Caoilinn Springall plays the young girl left behind and only manages to be more subdued than Clooney by not speaking at all. Jones and Oyelowo make for good stoic astronauts, and there are a few high tension scenes both in space and on terra firma. The ship itself is beautiful as are the brief scenes we get from K-23, the habitable moon of Jupiter they went to explore.
Clooney really seems to love the brooding space opera. I wonder how many times he’s seen 2001. The Midnight Sky doesn’t really stand out amongst films like Solaris and Gravity, but I did like it. It’s a nice, tidy two hours about an aging scientist trying to reconcile with his past. The apocalypse and space adventure are really just backdrop, and they go well out of their way to avoid talking about the whole we-killed-the-planet thing.
I’m not going to insist you watch The Midnight Sky, but I am going to insist that George take this face and this beard and go remake The Perfect Storm. I mean this guy definitely belongs at sea.
criticalmush.com 