comments The Midnight Sky opens with Augustine (George Clooney) in a sterile environment the Barbeau observatory in the Arctic Circle. It is February 2049, three weeks after the event, and he is alone, monitoring the spaceship Aether. The crew is returning home after a two-year mission to see if it the planet K23 would be our future. (Things didn t turn out as they planned).
However, when Aether crewmember Sully (Felicity Jones) is unable to make contact with NASA, and the ship veers off course, Augustine decides he must trek across a frozen tundra to a weather station to reestablish contact because planet Earth is, well, as Augustine tells Sully, We didn t take care of it while you were gone.
On Demand: George Clooney in futuristic The Midnight Sky and more
By Matt Shiverdecker
Now on streaming services: The Midnight Sky : Adapted from Lily Brooks-Dalton s novel Good Morning, Midnight, this science-fiction drama is directed by and starring George Clooney. He plays Augustine, a scientist who is suffering from an illness and likely doesn t have much life left in him. That doesn t really matter because, as the film begins in 2049, the planet is experiencing an unknown catastrophe that is quickly making it uninhabitable all around the globe. As everybody else at his Arctic research facility flees to underground shelters, Augustine stays behind to attempt communication with a spaceship that is on its way back to Earth. The crew on board was searching for new areas where humans could potentially relocate but is now headed back to a homeland destroyed to the point where they would not even be able to land. If the pressure of getting ahold of them wasn t bad enough, A
Screenshot: Netflix
Space movies are usually about hope. Usually, if a character heads off into the harsh vacuum of space, it’s because they’re exploring, or learning, making contact with aliens, or transforming into StarBabies, or trying to create a far-flung future for humanity. Because of that, I find it fascinating that
The Midnight Sky, an adaptation of Lily Brooks-Dalton’s novel,
Good Morning, Midnight, becomes a rare example of a bleak space movie. It’s an interesting, and often moving, addition to the space movie canon that never quite figures out what it wants to be.
The book is a quiet meditation on family, loneliness, and the sort of choices that people make without fully realizing that they’re defining their lives. It has a couple of plot twists that I thought worked pretty well, because Brooks-Dalton was able to build states of mind, sudden reveals, and emotional epiphanies in ways that novels are uniquely equipped to do. I was intrigued to see how the mo