The Mid­night Sky

There are some songs whose wide­spread, appar­ent­ly unabashed pop­u­lar­i­ty is irrefutable and yet impos­si­ble to explain. You know the ones – every­one seems to know the words, or at the very least can hum along, even though there’s no log­i­cal rea­son why this par­tic­u­lar tune has become lodged in the pub­lic consciousness.

Case in point: ​‘Sweet Car­o­line’ is rou­tine­ly chant­ed at base­ball games and box­ing match­es and is a sta­ple of tal­ent con­tests and karaōke bars every­where. It has fea­tured in dozens of adverts, films and tele­vi­sion shows, and at the time of writ­ing has racked up well over 300 mil­lion streams on Spo­ti­fy. It is to pop music what Nigel Farage is to British pol­i­tics: mad­den­ing­ly immovable.

In George Clooney’s lat­est direc­to­r­i­al effort, this ubiq­ui­tous soft rock anthem is sung in earnest by a group of astro­nauts who have been tasked with sav­ing human­i­ty – a sure sign that we are all, in fact, doomed. If the prospect of Neil Dia­mond tak­ing up res­i­den­cy in out­er space is enough to make you want to scream into the void, then con­sid­er your­self warned: that inaus­pi­cious nee­dle drop is by no means the only flat note in the film.

Based on Lily Brooks-Dalton’s 2016 nov­el ​‘Good Morn­ing, Mid­night’, The Mid­night Sky is yet anoth­er entry into the Sad Dad Space Movie canon, a vague the­mat­ic com­pos­ite of Ad Astra, High Life, Inter­stel­lar, Prometheus and the grandad­dy of the genre, 2001: A Space Odyssey. On a basic script lev­el, how­ev­er, the film it has most in com­mon with is Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, in that it too doesn’t quite land its lofty emo­tion­al payoff.

The year is 2049, and a post-apoc­a­lyp­tic premise is estab­lished in the open­ing frames by a title card that places us ​“three weeks after the event”. An unspec­i­fied eco­log­i­cal dis­as­ter has cut off Clooney’s griz­zly astronomer, Augus­tine, from the rest of civil­i­sa­tion – but as he pre­pares to hun­ker down in an aban­doned Arc­tic out­post, he dis­cov­ers that a small girl has been left behind, and so is now his respon­si­bil­i­ty and his alone.

Evi­dent­ly par­ent­hood is not sec­ond nature to Augus­tine; he’s more con­cerned with deliv­er­ing an urgent mes­sage to the afore­men­tioned astro­nauts, who are speed­ing across the uni­verse on a deep-space research ves­sel. On board are David Oyelowo, Tiffany Boone, Demián Bichir, Kyle Chan­dler and Felic­i­ty Jones, whose real-life baby bump (she was three months preg­nant when film­ing began) is exploit­ed in order to raise the dra­mat­ic stakes. Added to this, Jones’ Sul­ly, though clear­ly high­ly skilled, is the only crew mem­ber whose acu­men is repeat­ed­ly (albeit semi-jok­ing­ly) chal­lenged by her male col­leagues. Not exact­ly a giant leap for female STEM char­ac­ters, then.

If you haven’t already guessed, this is a film about con­nec­tion, about how the fun­da­men­tal human impulse to form bonds with one anoth­er is so pow­er­ful that it can tran­scend time and space. Through a hand­ful of expo­si­tion­al flash­backs we learn that Augus­tine (played in these scenes by recent Star Trek alum­nus Ethan Peck, who’s hard­ly a dead ringer for Clooney but does man­age to pull off an uncan­ny vocal impres­sion) is bril­liant and charm­ing but not much of a peo­ple per­son. He’s too wrapped up in his work, the irony being that his com­mit­ment to giv­ing life hope all but negates it from his own existence.

Net­flix report­ed­ly fur­nished Clooney’s artis­tic vision to the tune of $100m, but the result is remark­ably cheap-look­ing, from the CGI-ren­dered exte­ri­or shots of the space sta­tion to one espe­cial­ly ropey earth­bound action sequence in which Augus­tine inad­ver­tent­ly ploughs a snow­mo­bile through a sheet of ice. Part of the prob­lem is that we’ve seen it all before, only done bet­ter. It doesn’t help that it some­times feels like two dif­fer­ent screen­plays were filmed: a sur­vival thriller in which a lone pro­tag­o­nist skulks around a frozen dystopia; and a space dra­ma cen­tred around an ill-fat­ed mission.

If there’s a degree of intrigue sur­round­ing the dev­as­tat­ing events – both per­son­al and envi­ron­men­tal – that have brought Augus­tine and the astro­nauts to this point, the film is more unequiv­o­cal (read: heavy-hand­ed) in its mes­sage. On top of Alexan­dre Desplat’s maudlin score, which con­stant­ly tells us how we’re sup­posed to feel, the script trades in clichés and arti­fi­cial cathar­sis, offer­ing scant insight into the far-reach­ing exis­ten­tial ques­tions it pos­es. Hands, touch­ing hands, reach­ing out, falling short.