This post-apocalyptic tale follows Augustine, a lonely scientist in the Arctic, as he races to stop Sully and her fellow astronauts from returning home to a mysterious global catastrophe.
Survival story clashes with space opera in George Clooney’s latest oddity “The Midnight Sky.” The man has directed films both excellent (“Good Night, and Good Luck,” “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,” “The Ides of March”) and not-so-excellent (“The Monuments Men,” “Suburbicon,” “Leatherheads”) but “The Midnight Sky” takes the cake as his most discombobulated effort, a well-meaning and occasionally beautiful, but ultimately empty and strangely detached feature that will leave you scratching your head.
Taking place in 2049 (incidentally, the same year Deckard meets his replicant pursuer), “The Midnight Sky” introduces us to a post-apocalyptic, irradiated Earth. Most folks have either fled to the stars or burrowed themselves deep underground — both futile attempts at escaping humanity’s inevitable demise.
The terminally ill Augustine (George Clooney) tracks disappearing spaceships in a remote Arctic observatory, popping pills and surviving on constant blood transfusions. Memories of his youth, wherein he’s portrayed by the dashing Ethan Peck, haunt Augustine: he used to dream of migrating to Jupiter’s moon, K-23, which he believed to be habitable.
As it turns out, K-23 is indeed habitable, with a spaceship departing back to the devastated Earth to deliver the no-longer-relevant news. On board are Sully (Felicity Jones), Tom (David Oyelowo), Mitchell (Kyle Chandler), Sanchez (Demian Bichir), and Maya (Tiffany Boone) — interchangeable characters with nary a shred of depth or distinct personality traits. Unaware that Earth has been evacuated, they encounter obstacles along the way, having to change their original trajectory home.
In the meantime, Augustine discovers a young girl, Iris (Caoilinn Springall), hiding in his kitchen. The two form a silent bond — she doesn’t speak, see. Spotting Sully’s crew on its way back to certain death, Augustine makes it his mission to “contact them now, before it’s too late,” and stop them from coming home. (“What’s the alternative?” you may ask. Good question.) Problem is, the closest antenna that can reach the spaceship is “up north. It’s protected by this mountain range so the air might still be good… It’s a long way.” And so Augustine and Iris embark on their quest.
Clooney is a skilled filmmaker, so the film is certainly not devoid of merit. The sight of irradiated birds withering away, or a man begging quietly to be shot, or bubbles of blood inside a space helmet, or even the highly improbable escape-from-freezing-ice-water sequence will stay with you long after the credits roll. The glorious highlight is the sight of a demolished Earth, brown and decaying, from space — an image as dismal as it is gorgeous.
Between the flashbacks, the Augustine-Iris bonding scenes, the spaceship scenes, AND the surviving sequences, there’s just too much piled on here. Emotional whiplash is guaranteed. We veer from Augustine and Iris being hunted by wolves to the astronauts singing while performing a spacewalk, all within seconds — and then there are long stretches where Augustine is out of the picture completely, which affects our emotional involvement in the proceedings. It’s like two radically different films vying for attention.
“The Midnight Sky” is prone to sentimentality, Alexander Desplat’s overwhelming violins swelling to signify emotional peaks. The bonding scenes between Augustine and Iris vacillate between “a little forced” (the pea battle over dinner) and “genuinely affecting” (the two observing Mars in the skylight during one of his blood transfusions). Clooney could’ve picked up the pace a bit; the film sags and drags under its own portentousness.
Clooney, normally one of our most charismatic stars, is all sunken eyes and limp walk here, going for “understated” but ending up with “distancing.” Perhaps if Clooney-the-director took notes from his collaboration with Steven Soderbergh on the excellent “Solaris” and kept it all minimalist, cold, sterile, Kubrickian, he would’ve been on to something. As it stands, “The Midnight Sky” makes it halfway to the stars.
In Select Theaters and on Netflix Wednesday, December 23rd
