118 min | PG-13 | December 11, 2020 | Netflix
A dying scientist in the Arctic tries to warn a returning spacecraft that Earth is no longer worth coming home to. George Clooney directs himself as a man racing his own mortality across the ice. The end of the world has rarely felt this tired.
Augustine Lofthouse stays behind at an Arctic research station after an unnamed catastrophe poisons the planet. He is sick and alone until a mute child named Iris appears in the evacuated halls. Far above, the crew of the spacecraft Aether returns from a survey of a habitable moon with no idea what waits below. The film cuts between Augustine trudging across the ice to reach a transmitter and the astronauts drifting home toward silence. The Midnight Sky is about a man trying to spare strangers the knowledge that there is nothing left to save.
George Clooney plays Augustine as a husk of a former golden boy, hollowed out by illness and regret. He carries the weight in his posture and his rasp rather than his dialogue. Felicity Jones plays Sully with a steadiness that anchors the orbital scenes, and her pregnancy gives the crew something to protect. David Oyelowo plays the commander Adewole with quiet authority, and Demián Bichir gives Sanchez a homesick decency that the script underuses. Caoilinn Springall says nothing as Iris and still holds the camera, which exposes how little the talking characters are given.
Clooney directs from a script by Mark L. Smith, who adapts Lily Brooks-Dalton’s novel “Good Morning, Midnight.” The visual effects earn their ambition. A micrometeoroid strike on the Aether unfolds in long unbroken takes, with droplets of blood floating in zero gravity while the hull tears open. Martin Ruhe’s cinematography sells the Arctic as a white void that swallows men whole. The trouble is the cross-cutting. Each time the ice story builds dread, the film jumps to space and resets the tension to zero.
The two halves never fuse into one engine. The Arctic thread wants to be a survival drama about a man making peace with his choices. The orbital thread wants to be a procedural about astronauts coming home to grief. Both are competently mounted and neither is allowed to finish its thought before the other interrupts. The Midnight Sky has the scale of an epic and the pulse of an elegy, and it mistakes exhaustion for depth.