A Review of The Midnight Sky
I opened my Netflix app and saw the list of new movies. The Midnight Sky was in the top five movies in the U.S. But when I noticed it was another tale of global catastrophe, I hesitated, and had no desire to watch one man alone trying to save what was left of the human race. Normally there were a lot of cliche scenes and gratuitous heroics that are only fun in a theatre and feel sickening by the time you got home. I clicked to start it because making a movie in 2020 is challenging and I figured a few minutes at 1.25 speed shouldn’t be too bad.
The beginning did not catch me right away and I had to be patient. You have your ‘world on notice’ scene, a flashback, where people were being evacuated from the last place on Earth that was safe for the time being. I didn’t understand why people and their families were going into the places that were affected, uninhabitable, or both. You just had a population that was dead, one last man at a station in the north pole, and the members of a spaceship that was coming back to Earth after finding a habitable moon of Jupiter.
Despite what I thought might be boring is where George Clooney shines. I knew that to make and release great movies this year, a writer, producer and director would have to become a genius at the small remote scenes. George who is a master of facial expression and emotional acting gave us the uneasy feeling we would have, being that secluded. One by one, the fears I had gave way to a sense that you cannot do anything at the moment about what happened to Earth in 2049.
The protagonist never asks anyone to change because he knew and feared the day would come when the Earth would rebel against the people who hurt her beyond repair. I felt in time the Earth would bounce back but humanity outstayed their welcome and nothing in the movie spoke of hope on Earth.
I had a hard time with his isolation and the drifting of his mind but that only meant the Professor at the station was hitting uncomfortable areas of my senses that needed activating. I know about being alone with your thoughts as a hiker who packed alone sometimes throughout New Hampshire but when I understood the clarity you gained from it, I kept watching.
This movie is more than the one chance to contact the spaceship before they orbited Earth and came down to find nothing was the same. It was the love of one man who didn’t give up trying despite hallucinations, an arduous journey over the frozen north sea, and kidney failure and a crew of a ship who loved their families, each other, and understood the risks ahead of them. I will say no more.
You will love this movie because the hope you will feel is the hope of a person who understands being cornered with few ways out, being brave enough to take it, and the sacrifice needed for a new world you cannot be part of.
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The end
