In George Clooney's
The Midnight Sky, the journey across Arctic's snowy expanse literalises a hero's self-redemption. A grizzled old scientist treks through an icy wasteland to contact a crew of astronauts. He must prevent them from returning to an Earth destroyed by a mysterious catastrophe.
Clooney's imposing vision of a dying world brings to mind Cormac McCarthy’s
The Road. Only, if McCarthy explored the depths of human nature, Clooney barely scratches the surface. Where films like
Solaris and
The Midnight Sky gets stuck in shallow soap opera.
So his adaptation of Lily Brooks-Dalton's novel plays too much like a vanilla sci-fi drama with literary aspirations.