I really wanted to like the latest George Clooney movie, The Midnight Sky, on Netflix, so much so that I sat through the entire two hours even though my family was ready to give up, all in the hope that the ending would make this really slow-paced boring movie worth a watch. Sadly, that ending never came.
When an unidentified cataclysmic event wipes out most of Earth’s population, the remaining people try to go underground to escape the powerful radiation. Dr. Augustine Lofthouse (George Clooney), a scientist looking for habitable planets, refuses to evacuate his base in the Arctic, and instead tries to locate any space missions to warn them of the situation on Earth. The only space mission that is currently commissioned is the space craft Aether that is returning to Earth after exploring K-23, Jupiter’s habitable moon. The movie is about the astronauts on Aether and the challenges they face in space when they are unable to contact Earth, and Augustine with the help of Iris, a little girl accidentally left behind during the evacuation, trying desperately to contact the astronauts who may be mankind’s last chance of survival.
While the story does sound interesting, and the performances are spot on, the narration is too slow and the only scene with some excitement is too brief and cliched. What I want to know is, if Hollywood will ever get tired of space debris wreaking havoc and someone dying as a result of it. This scene is so obvious in The Midnight Sky, that you could predict exactly when it was going to happen, how it was going to unfold and who was going to die as a result of it. This and the fact that they never try to explain anything in the film, made it very hard for me to like the film. The only good thing in the film is Caoilinn Springall as Iris, and some of the scenes she shares with Clooney’s Augustine.
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