George Clooney's first big screen role in four years arrives in Irish cinemas this weekend.
Marriage Story. Roma. Gerald's Game. The Two Popes. Dolemite Is My Name. Annihilation. Da 5 Bloods. The Meyerowitz Stories. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.
Nobody can say that Netflix haven't delivered some great original movies in recent years, but any time they dip a toe into the properly big-budget, blockbuster'y event movies, they have yet to properly stick the landing. Bright, Project Power, 6 Underground, Spencer Confidential, Outlaw King... they vary from forgettable to just plain bad.
And so here we have The Midnight Sky, a $100 million sci-fi movie, directed by and starring George Clooney (his first big screen appearance since 2016!), with an impressive cast and cutting edge special effects... but will anyone be talking about this movie a year from now? Even a month now? Probably not.
Clooney plays a terminally-ill scientist, one of the last two people on Earth following a non-specific environmental disaster that sent the surviving remainder of humanity underground. Clooney is paired with a young, mute girl (newcomer Caoilinn Springall), who has been accidentally left behind during the evacuation. They're both surviving at a science station in the Arctic when they discover a spaceship is on course to return to Earth from a successful mission to find the population a new home on a previously undiscovered moon around Jupiter, so they must set off across the frozen tundra towards a more powerful satellite station to inform them that there is nowhere safe for them to land on the freshly-ruined Earth.
Meanwhile, on board the spaceship, the crew - Felicity Jones, David Oyelowo, Demian Bichir, Kyle Chandler, Tiffany Boone - are all very happy at having discovered a future for their race, but worried that they've had no communication with anyone from Earth in weeks. Heading on an uncharted course back home, they encounter one potentially lethal obstacle after another, with no knowledge of what awaits for them when, or if, they make it back.
So we've got bits of Interstellar, bits of Gravity, bits of The Day After Tomorrow, bits of The Road... not an original strand of DNA to be found throughout, except with how vague the environmental threat on Earth actually is, which proves to be more irritating that thought-provoking.
The set-up between the two parallel stories works well enough, with a group of great actors giving decent performances, paired with lush cinematography and fantastic special effects, and there is a certain sequence about half-way through - which leans heavily into the Gravity borrowing - that represents a proper, nail-biting highlight.
After that though, it becomes a real slog to the finish line. What should have been a race-against-time thriller becomes unnecessarily drawn out with long scenes of people overly explaining their feelings, and after a swift, punchy opening hour, the final half feels endless. It doesn't help that Alexandre Desplat's score lays it on thick with the saccharinely sweet music at times, or an illogical ending to both stories that really leaves us with more questions, but no desire for more answers.
It is a real shame, because for the first half this almost felt like Netflix's first good blockbuster, the kind of movie you'd want to seek out on an IMAX screen, plus it is great to see Clooney outside of a coffee ad for a change. But after getting that close, the movie seems to bounce right off the atmosphere, and off into the endless void of forgettability.
The Midnight Sky is released in select Irish cinemas on Friday, December 11, and will be available to watch at home on the streaming service from Wednesday, December 23.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXUUqr3AFKs
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