‘The Midnight Sky’ Review: A Sterile Saga of Global Apocalypse and Space Missions
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You really can’t fault others for comparing The Midnight Sky with The Revenant (2015). With both penned by acclaimed screenwriter, Mark L. Smith, the connection between them is as legit as distant relatives who share a common bloodline. I would not go to the extent of labelling the depiction of freezing cold environment and the element of survival as something uniquely attributed to Smith, but both The Midnight Sky and The Revenant certainly share this similar trait. For the case of The Midnight Sky, the extreme temperatures are tied to the location of George Clooney’s character when the plot begins.
Clooney was certainly one busy man during the production of The Midnight Sky, having to lead and direct the filming while at the same time putting on a thick, orange coat to transform himself into Dr Augustine Lofthouse, the lead character of the film. In The Midnight Sky, Augustine (Clooney) is a renowned scientist who had discovered a habitable planet and opened the books for humanity’s space colonization. After certain events which have left him stranded in Barbeau Observatory, he is determined to make contact and warn spacecraft Aether — which is manned by Commander Adewole (David Oyelowo), Sully (Felicity Jones), Mitchell (Kyle Chandler) and two others — not to return to Earth, because humanity’s home planet is being consumed by an irreversible catastrophe which renders it inhabitable. While at it, Lofthouse needs to deal with a mysterious girl (Caoilinn Springall) who had fled evacuation efforts and became isolated in his observatory.
Why the Artic, though? The snowy backdrop was not purposely handpicked by Smith to showcase his work experience in depicting snowstorms. This film happens because Clooney has acquired the film adaptation rights for the novel that it is based on, Good Morning, Midnight, which has pretty much sealed the location of the story in the freezing landscape. It is definitely there to set the tone of the entire story, which plays out to be isolation.
Notwithstanding the message that Clooney is trying to convey in The Midnight Sky, isolation is perhaps the sole word which strongly describes the film as a whole. I am surprised and a little disturbed by how calm the film is — scenes are largely static by nature, that…
