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| Caoilinn Springall and George Clooney in "The Midnight Sky" Photo Credit: RottenTomatoes.com |
While George Clooney’s career as an actor has been consistent in terms of quality, his work as a director has been up and down. He’s had critically acclaimed films like, “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,” Good Night, and Good Luck,” and “The Ides of March,” but he didn’t have such luck with his films “Leatherheads,” “The Monuments Men,” and “Suburbicon.”
Given how Clooney has built up a filmography (as both an actor and a director) of working on movies that deal with social and political issues, I was eager to see how he would handle science-fiction for his next directorial project, “The Midnight Sky.” Unfortunately, although he shows glimmers of his talents as a filmmaker, he never reaches the full potential that the story promises.
In 2049, Augustine Lofthouse (Clooney) works at a research outpost in the Arctic. When an unknown global catastrophe forces the staff to evacuate, he decides to stay. Afterwards, he finds a young girl, Iris (Caoilinn Springall), who was left behind. Augustine soon realizes that he must contact a space crew, made up of Dr. Sullivan (Felicity Jones), Commander Adewole (David Oyelowo), Maya (Tiffany Boone), Sanchez (Demián Bichir), and Mitchell (Kyle Chandler), to warn them against returning to Earth.
While Clooney does what he can with the character, the role pretty much just has him looking and sounding weary. While he’s given the chance to express more emotion in the last couple of scenes, it’s not enough to make his character as complex as he was in the book.
Springall’s performance is mostly nonverbal, so she has to rely on conveying her thoughts with her eyes and facial expressions. Unlike the other characters in the book and their movie counterparts, what you see in Springall’s character in the source material is what you have in the movie. While there isn’t a whole lot to her character, there are moments when Springall shows her character’s ability to look into Augustine’s soul, seeming like she can see what he feels. This at least adds a layer to the bond that the two characters create as they try to survive the harsh conditions of the Arctic.
It’s a shame that such a talented cast was assembled to portray the space crew because, although they show fine chemistry, their characters are about as one-dimensional as Clooney’s. But, just like him, they’re given some dramatic material with which to work in the last half hour. It’s a chance for them to show the talents that we’ve seen them exhibit in the past, but the movie does them a disservice in offering very little dramatic heft in other parts of the movie.
Given how Mark L. Smith was a cowriter with Alejandro G. Iñárritu on the latter’s film, “The Revenant,” you would think that he would be a good fit to write “The Midnight Sky,” seeing as both that and “The Revenant” are survival stories. However, the power that was put into “The Revenant” is missing here. One of the areas where Smith’s screenplay, which is based on Lily Brooks-Dalton’s 2016 novel, “Good Morning, Midnight,” suffers the most is the thin characterization. The blandness of the characters isn’t at the fault of the actors and actresses portraying them, but more so in the way that they’re adapted. In the book, we’re given access to Augustine and Sullivan’s thoughts, while also learning details from some of the other characters’ backstories, but you’re not provided with that chance to learn much about anyone because of how watered down those backstories are.
The screenplay also cuts back on a lot of the tension that arises among the space crew in the source material. What makes their storyline in the book so engaging is how they don’t always get along but have to overcome their animosity so that they can take care of any life-threatening issues that arise. In the film, it’s mainly them going about day-to-day business. However, Smith does offer one tense scene near the beginning of the third act that captures the apprehension of the novel and is one of the few memorable sequences of the film.
Despite the thinness of the script, Clooney does an okay job when extracting whatever tension that he can out of the story. With a reliably beautiful score from Alexandre Desplat and some fine-looking cinematography from Martin Ruhe that displays the unforgiving vastness of the Arctic and space, Clooney at least succeeds in making the movie atmospheric here and there.
In the end, “The Midnight Sky” had the promise to be a compelling sci-fi drama, but just like something floating in space, it’s rather weightless.
Grade: C
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