The melancholy-tuned survival drama about surviving in the conditions of a dying world meets sci-fi from a spaceship in Clooney’s directorial work, which finds out that there is nowhere to return.
Pros
- The gloomy, heavy mood of the film, to which the movement of the protagonist through the disappearing world corresponds.
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Minusy
- The characteristics of the characters of the members of the space crew are drawn only very briefly.
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The day before Christmas, Netflix gave viewers a gift in the form of a sci-fi drama, whose director, producer and main protagonist is George Clooney. The 59-year-old actor returns to the camera after four years and to the director’s chair after three years.
He chose the four-year-old novel Good Morning, Midnight by the American writer Lily Brooks-Dalton, as a model for the film. His free screenwriting adaptations were taken over by Mark L. Smith, who had previously co-wrote the screenplay for the revenge of the thriller REVENANT Resurrection with director Iñárritu. https://avmania.zive.cz/revenant-zmrtvychvstani-recenze-filmu
With this adaptation, George Clooney touches for the first time as a director a genre with which he had experience only as an actor. For example, in a movie Gravitation. And just into the community of intelligent sci-fi like Gravity, Interstellar, Martian or Ad Astra The midnight sky is heading.
Spacecraft crew warning
Like their directors, Clooney seeks to combine a great cosmic adventure with a intimate human plane that has a family character and a strong emotional impact. And he’s doing half and half. The narrative blends two or three levels of story, respectively, with the one associated with the figure of a lone scientist in the freezing Arctic trying to warn astronauts returning to Earth. The conditions on it changed during their stay in space.
But the scientist, as we will find out in the end, is called Augustine Lofthouse (George Clooney) and he is struggling with a serious disease that requires dialysis. As a result of the global catastrophe, not only the planet dies, but so does he. When the researcher discovers that the crew of the spacecraft Æther, which is exploring the habitable moon K-23, which was discovered by Augustine near Jupiter, is returning to Earth, he decides to discourage her from doing so.
But first he must find an antenna station in the Arctic that is strong enough for its signal to reach the spaceship. He is kept company by the baby girl Iris, who appeared at the original Barbeau Observatory, where he stayed and from where they travel together across the North Pole, facing a number of dangerous obstacles.
Concealing information about the characters and the nature of the disaster
Contact with the ship nakonecther is finally established, and with him gradually it becomes clear who Augustine is, the unknown girl with big eyes, to whom Augustine clings with her father’s bond and what happened to Earth. It is the concealment of information about both the characters and the nature of the unspecified catastrophe that stimulates our curiosity as to what world we actually found ourselves in.
We know that the story takes place in 2049 and that the high radiation caused a catastrophe of a global nature. And that near Jupiter lies the moon, which has an atmosphere and conditions suitable for human settlement. As spectators, we are thrown right in the middle of the story, watching Augustine’s actions after he refused to evacuate from the Arctic.
In flashbacks, we meet Augustine thirty years ago, when he made decisions related to his private and family life due to his scientific research. He is now rethinking them in the light of the catastrophe that has befallen humanity. And he is all the more aware that the values of belonging, closeness, family and interpersonal ties are the last thing that remains when everything collapses or disappears forever.
Melancholic reminder of a vanishing world
So Clooney’s film is also a melancholy look back at a world that will never return. Hence his mood. Gloomy, heavy, supple, like the movement of a protagonist. The reflection of the hopelessness in which the world finds itself is reflected in the meditative nature of the dialogues in establishing communication with the space crew member Sully (Felicity Jones) and in the all-encompassing view of Augustine himself. George Clooney lost 11 pounds because of the role, grew a gray beard and turned into an aging man, whose shuffling gait and shortness of breath reflected a loss of physical strength.
The film gets a slightly brisk gradient only in the passages of the transfer from the observatory to the meteorological station with a stronger signal, when Augustine rushes on a snowmobile in a blizzard and the ice breaks under it. The visual side, using Icelandic locations that have replaced the Arctic, is impressive, including a game with light in a blizzard, played by Martin Ruhe’s camera.
Alexander Desplat’s longing music corresponds to the dramatic events on the screen and the themes that the film opens. The family background as well as the expectations of new life are reflected in the decision of the members of the space crew as to whether or not to return to Earth.
It is a pity that the characteristics of the characters of the crew members are drawn only very briefly, we still understand their motivation. For example, from holographic videos with which they remember their loved ones in their memories. The most prominent of them is the astronaut Sully, who also becomes the key to the final point. George Clooney insisted that it be played by Felicity Jones, who became pregnant shortly after her cast, so he adapted her role accordingly.
In the film, two genres and lines meet. A melancholy-tuned survival drama about freezing survival and science fiction from a spaceship that discovers that it has nowhere to return. Both storylines, including the use of the retrospective one, have in common the theme of family ties, but otherwise they rub against each other rather than fit together organically. The cosmic one pays for the flatness of the characters and only clarifies its meaning at the end.
In the Midnight Sky, George Clooney tried to combine the techniques of art cinema, such as the slow pace of narration and the vague background around the characters and the situation in which they find themselves, with thriller genre elements. However, the result shows that he feels much more confident as a director in dramas from journalistic and political environments such as Good Night and Good Luck https://avmania.zive.cz/10-novinari-jako-hlidaci-psi-demokracie-ve-filmu/ ch-6845 # articleStart or Day of Betrayal https://avmania.zive.cz/den-zrady-recenze-filmu than in more narrative matters such as Památkářů https://avmania.zive.cz/pamatkari-recenze-filmu or just this last act.
Midnight sky
- Genre: sci-fi drama
- Original name: The Midnight Sky
- https://www.netflix.com/cz/title/80244645
- USA, 2020
- Screenplay: Mark L. Smith (Lily Brooks-Dalton)
- Director: George Clooney
- Hrají: George Clooney, Caoilinn Springall, Kyle Chandler, Felicity Jones, David Oyelowo, Demián Bichir, Tiffany Boone, Lilja Nótt Þórarinsdóttir
- Distribution: Netflix
- Distribution premiere in the Czech Republic: 23 December 2020
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