comments The Midnight Sky opens with Augustine (George Clooney) in a sterile environment the Barbeau observatory in the Arctic Circle. It is February 2049, three weeks after the event, and he is alone, monitoring the spaceship Aether. The crew is returning home after a two-year mission to see if it the planet K23 would be our future. (Things didn t turn out as they planned).
However, when Aether crewmember Sully (Felicity Jones) is unable to make contact with NASA, and the ship veers off course, Augustine decides he must trek across a frozen tundra to a weather station to reestablish contact because planet Earth is, well, as Augustine tells Sully, We didn t take care of it while you were gone.
Review: George Clooney’s The Midnight Sky
Earth is nigh-uninhabitable. Humanity has retreated to various space stations. Yet despite the apocalyptic circumstances, one steadfast fellow continues to do his job, the routine possibly keeping him alive. But it all changes when he unexpectedly meets a girl. George Clooney‘s
The Midnight Sky may be based on the book
Good Morning, Midnight, but it also plays like a live-action gritty reboot of
WALL-E.
We’re never told what “The Event” is that made all but the polar ice caps uninhabitable, but we do know that Augustine (Clooney, who also directs) is as terminally ill as the planet. He even gives himself dialysis every day, in between generic meals and attempts to contact the various space stations. One, named Aether, is on its way back from the moons of Jupiter. And the crew aboard, led by David Oyelowo’s Adewole and Felicity Jones’ Rembshire, are blissfully unaware of why all their transmissions remain unanswered, assu
George Clooney brings bleakness and humanity with The Midnight Sky
The Midnight Sky. Felicity Jones and David Oyelowo in
The Midnight Sky. George Clooney in
Photo by Philippe Antonello/Netflix The year 2020 has played host to a nightmarish global catastrophe, so ending the year with a movie about a nightmarish global catastrophe may not be at the top of many people’s lists. That’s the divide which the new Netflix movie
The Midnight Sky must bridge, something made easier by the presence of a movie star like George Clooney. Clooney, who both stars in and directs the film, plays Augustine, a scientist with terminal cancer who chooses to stay behind at a remote Arctic outpost when an unspecified disaster hits the entire Earth in 2049. Simultaneously, a group of astronauts – including Sully (Felicity Jones), Adewole (David Oyelowo), and Mitchell (Kyle Chandler) – who had been scouting a previously undiscovered moon of Jupiter as a possible new colony are on their
Movie Review – The Midnight Sky (2020)
Directed by George Clooney.
Starring George Clooney, Felicity Jones, Kyle Chandler, Demián Bichir, David Oyelowo, Tiffany Boone, Caoilinn Springall, Sophie Rundle, and Ethan Peck.
SYNOPSIS:
A lone scientist in the Arctic races to contact a crew of astronauts returning home to a mysterious global catastrophe.
Those hoping that Netflix were set to wrap up 2020 by throwing yet another awards-chasing hat into the ring may be left a little deflated by George Clooney’s
The Midnight Sky, an enticingly glossy and respectably ambitious sci-fi thriller that nevertheless feels like a jigsaw puzzle with a few pieces too many.
It may be the unique circumstances in which we are living, but it feels like every movie released in 2020 turns out to be about subsistence. Right until the final light is extinguished (or the final fade to black), it’s all about getting by as best we can, for as long as that may be.
“The Midnight Sky,” directed by and starring George Clooney, is no different. Adapted by Mark L. Smith (“The Revenant”) from Lily Brooks-Dalton’s novel “Good Morning, Midnight,” the film places Clooney, as accomplished astronomer Augustine Lofthouse, in the midst of a global cataclysm in the year 2049. The end is indeed nigh.