Netflix Review - The Midnight Sky (2020)

Welcome back, George Clooney. It’s been a while since we saw him in front of the camera – Money Monster in 2016 – and it’s been almost as long since was in the director’s chair for Suburbicon. But let’s not dwell on that. A film bearing his name always attracts attention and for The Midnight Sky he’s joined forces with Netflix for a movie that appears to be a natural for the big screen.

Indeed, it’s had a short run at selected cinemas but, with the majority of them closed in the UK, it’s fortunate that his latest offering is also available online. This time round, he returns to his fascination with outer space, playing aging and terminally ill scientist Augustine Lofthouse who opts to stay behind at a remote arctic research station while everybody else departs to go home. An event – could be war, could be climate catastrophe, could be both – means that life on Earth is doomed and Lofthouse has discovered that, while the majority of spaceships have also returned home, one remains out there. The Aether is on its way back from a new, habitable planet but nobody has heard from the crew in weeks, so they have no idea what awaits them. He needs to contact them.

With its emphasis on solitude and communication – or the lack of it – the film inevitably strikes an instant chord under current circumstances. But Clooney’s character can only take that theme so far, as he’s naturally a solitary person with little in the way of a life outside his job – and, in flashbacks, we see how that affected the one close relationship in his life. Instead, the actor is back on one of his favourite territories, the big set-piece space opera, following on from the likes of Solaris and Gravity. And it owes a huge visual debt to Cuaron’s epic, with its balletic walks in the void and shattering storms. They’re arresting images, fascinating and graceful for all their mechanics, yet we’ve seen them all before.

It’s a film of two halves, the first belonging to Clooney and the second to the crew of the Aether. And, although it promises to address big issues – as they go, the fate of the human race and its home planet doesn’t get much bigger – that’s not what we get. It settles for fatherhood and motherhood, like other films before it, perhaps most notably Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, not the big scientific ideas that we’re lead to expect. At the research station and out in the snow, there’s Augustine’s relationship with the silent child he calls Iris (Caoilinn Springall), while up on the Aether, a pregnant Sully (Felicity Jones) is waiting for a call from an otherwise silent Earth. And eventually the two parallel narratives come together, although some of the details are surprisingly avoided.

The Midnight Sky takes itself very seriously – more seriously than you would expect from a film where some of the crew of the Aether burst into a spontaneous rendition of Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline – and it leaves you wishing there was more in the way of substance to deserve that solemnity. But, for its limitations, the inevitable comparisons and a two hour running time, it still manages to command your attention, mainly because of the visuals and the pulling power of Clooney himself and the likes of Felicity Jones and David Oyelowo. But speculation about its award winning chances is unlikely to last very long.