The Midnight Sky: Too tedious to thrill
By IANS |
Published on
Sun, Dec 27 2020 7:06 IST |
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The Midnight Sky: Too tedious to thrill (IANS Review; Rating: and 1/2 ). Image Source: IANS News
The Midnight Sky; Cast: George Clooney, Ethan Peck, Felicity Jones, David Oyelowo, Tiffany Boone, Demian Bichir, Kyle Chandler, Caoilinn Springall; Direction: George Clooney; Direction: and 1/2 (two and a half stars)BY VINAYAK CHAKRAVORTY
George Clooney s new film is fascinating for the ominous mood it conveys visually. Set against the aftermath of a global catastrophe, the sci-fi drama has poignant core, too. You spot profound intent in storytelling, and the comment it sets out to impart is an urgent one.
Director/star George Clooney’s
The Midnight Sky, an alternately moving and exciting mediation on the apocalypse, is now available to stream on Netflix.
The year is 2049 and something in the air is killing everyone and everything on Earth. Whatever it is (we’re never told), it spreads like a radiation cloud (which it might be) and will soon consume the whole planet. It’s literally the End of the World, and after having come to terms with that fact, a scientific base in the Arctic is being evacuated so everyone can go and be with their families. Left behind is Augustine Lofthouse (George Clooney), a scientist whose obsessive dedication to his work has ensured he has no one to go home to.
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.
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.