The Midnight Sky (2020)
Directed by George Clooney
A lone scientist in the Arctic races to contact a crew of astronauts returning home to a mysterious global catastrophe.
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6 films that influenced The Midnight Sky
What critics say influenced The Midnight Sky
Without venturing onto a tundra of spoilers, “The Midnight Sky” recalls the human connection concerns of Denis Villeneuve’s “Arrival,” or Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar,” as well as the various versions of the survival thriller “I Am Legend.”
Sci-fi fanboys will no doubt find The Midnight Sky too solemn, and its echoes of movies like Interstellar , The Martian and Ad Astra don't always play in its favor.
And who could forget Matt Damon in 2015’s The Martian and Matthew McConaughey in 2014’s Interstellar ?
But the film often feels less like its own distinct narrative than a sort of greatest-hits amalgam of movies like The Martian , Gravity, Interstellar, Ad Astra , and all the others that came before; one more long-haul tale of lonely astronauts and contrails in the cosmos.
It’s much, much closer to Interstellar for me.
The story itself teeters between being overly derivative and disarmingly earnest, with earlier efforts like Interstellar , the aforementioned Gravity , The Martian , 2001: A Space Odyssey , and Moon all touched on as the film progresses.
Sci-fi fanboys will no doubt find The Midnight Sky too solemn, and its echoes of movies like Interstellar , The Martian and Ad Astra don't always play in its favor.
And who could forget Matt Damon in 2015’s The Martian and Matthew McConaughey in 2014’s Interstellar ?
But the film often feels less like its own distinct narrative than a sort of greatest-hits amalgam of movies like The Martian , Gravity, Interstellar, Ad Astra , and all the others that came before; one more long-haul tale of lonely astronauts and contrails in the cosmos.
In scenes set in 2049 that recycle bits of “The Martian” and “Gravity,” astronauts aboard the Aether race to return to Earth after a long voyage to find a habitable planet named K23.
Essentially, it’s a middle ground between the pulse-pounding intensity of Gravity and the “sciencing the shit out of things” fun of The Martian .
You know what you’re in for in the opening minutes, where Clooney, playing a man named Augustine, is all alone, like Matt Damon in “The Martian” or the boyhood Ebenezer Scrooge left behind for the holidays at boarding school.
Without venturing onto a tundra of spoilers, “The Midnight Sky” recalls the human connection concerns of Denis Villeneuve’s “Arrival,” or Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar,” as well as the various versions of the survival thriller “I Am Legend.”
Half of the film sees him channelling both Iñárritu and DiCaprio, as he drops himself into a kind of polar spin on The Revenant (scripted by the writer of the actual Revenant , Mark L. Smith).
His previous work on The Revenant is a clue about the vibe here.
Returning to the screen for the first time in four years, Clooney and a committed ensemble cast lead a film that so desperately wants to be the sci-fi version of The Revenant , they hired the same screenwriter, Mark L. Smith.
In "The Midnight Sky," astutely adapted by "The Revenant" screenwriter Mark L. Smith from "Good Morning, Midnight," the 2016 novel by Lily Brooks-Dalton, Clooney plays Augustine, an astronomer who sacrificed his personal life to get lost in the stars.
And yet as moving as it can be, largely due to Clooney’s melancholy stoic resolve, Mark L. Smith’s (“The Revenant”) adaptation of Lily Brooks-Dalton’s novel ‘Good Morning, Midnight’ always feels like something we have experienced before.
The adaptation by Mark L. Smith (“The Revenant”) features frustrating lapses in credibility.
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Arriving just before Christmas in a similar release slot to Bird Box , The Midnight Sky will be looking to be a similar draw for Netflix viewers this year.
That story point echoes the premise of “Ad Astra,” except in this case there’s a weird fuzziness to it: After “the event,” the people on Earth really do need a place to go — but the Aether began its voyage long before.