The Midnight Sky is the latest movie from Netflix and is directed by and starring George Clooney as Augustine Lofthouse, an astronomer who might be the last person on the earth after an unspecified global catastrophe. He is trying to reach the crew of the Æther, a spaceship returning from a mission from one of the moons of Jupiter. It is captained by a pregnant Sully (Felicity Day), her husband Adewole (David Oyelowo), inexperienced medic Maya (Tiffany Boone), and crewmen Sanchez (Damien Bichir) and Mitchell (Kyle Chandler). While alone, Augustine finds a young girl who cannot speak (Caoilinn Springall).
Its hard to talk about this movie as a whole as it feels like two separate films that come together at the end. That will be reflected in this text, because as well as being separate narratives, each has different problems.
PART 1: THE ÆTHER
SOME MINOR GRIEVANCES
The Æther as previously stated is a spaceship with a small crew that was sent to one of the moons of Jupiter. It is set about 30 years ago, so technology has advanced, but I would hazard a guess and say that it is still a long trip there and back. Sully is pregnant and most likely was impregnated during the trip, which would be something I would think NASA, or whatever agency sending them on their mission, would frown upon. Its another mouth to feed, and could cause a myriad of potential health problems for the mother and child. Not to mention the fact that the pregnant Sully is chosen to go out on a dangerous and stressful spacewalk, putting two lives at risk. And even if she is the only one who could fix the broken radar, there are clear video and communications from inside the ship to outside, meaning she can direct anyone to fix it. Its and unnecessary and unbelievable risk that these characters made.
One of the only source of conflict for the crew of the Æther is that the auto pilot on the ship fails, sending them a few degrees off course. A few degrees may not seem like much, but in space it can mean using too much fuel to realign themselves back into the correct trajectory. So the crew decides to pilot through unmapped space and hope there is nothing there. As it happens, there are meteors there.
Unfortunately, this conflict falls under the coincidence category, a death knell for many plot points and conflicts in storytelling. Its such a simple fix as well that its a shame nothing was done about it. All there needs to be is one or two lines of dialogue that explain why the auto pilot was shut off. Maybe an unexpected flare of radiation? Some minor space debris? Anything other than no explanation at all. Otherwise the storyteller shows their hand, and the story feels contrived. Every story has strings that the author pulls, but the trick is to mask those strings so no one sees.
SLOW PACING DOESN’T MEAN BAD PACING
The Midnight Sky is a slower paced movie than most big budget movies, and mainstream audiences with shorter attention spans may see this automatically as a negative. Especially a streaming audience, who don’t have the obligation of paying 15$+ tickets at a theater. Its much easier to shut off a “free” streaming movie than walk out a theater. And for the most part, the opening of The Midnight Sky does a good job of grabbing the audience with a great George Clooney performance.
Every story has a pace that works best to tell it. Augustine Lofthouse’s story has problems, but there is nothing that can be fixed by upping the pace. Its slow, contemplative, lonely and is the perfect pace to tell this story. Unfortunately, its only half of this story, and the pacing has to carry over from one half of the story to another. Without it the audience risks getting tonal whiplash. Especially when the two halves are being cut to back and forth, and those two halves are pretty distant from each other.
However, the slow pace does not necessarily work perfect for the storyline on the Æther. There are more characters and a lighter tone in general than the story back on Earth. And that slow pacing that’s brought from one storyline to another comes to a head in paradoxically one of the worst and best scenes in the movie.
THE SPACEWALK
The spacewalk is a long scene in the latter half of the movie where three spacemen venture out to repair the communication radar after it was struck by space debris. It all culminates in the droplets of blood sequence where Maya discovers she has been wounded as blood floats around in her helmet. It becomes a race to get her medical attention and is a tense and visually great looking scene. The problem is everything before it.
This scene begs for a more seasoned director and writer to be at the helm. Both George Clooney and Mark L. Smith have nine credits to their names of directing and writing respectively. And this scene is one that needs better direction. The entire scene is an attempt at building tension, that does no such thing. There are a couple different reasons for this, but the sequence, outside of the finale with the blood, seems aped off of other stories. Like it seems that they knew there is supposed to be lighthearted moments of levity before a tragedy and that can be used to ramp up tension in some cases. But it is used so ineffectively.
First off the sequence is too long to be effective. The build up of Maya being sick in the spaceship, to getting out and moving around, to a whole verse and chorus of Sweet Caroline, more spacewalking and fixing until the asteroids come is just mindnumbingly long. Especially when you consider where it falls in the runtime.
METATEXTUAL STORYTELLING
When telling a story, one has to always be aware of the audience and expectations that they have of the story. This changes from medium to medium and genre to genre, but its always there. Its a delicate balance of giving the audience what they want but not being overtly predictable.
In the context of The Midnight Sky, the spacewalk scene comes in the latter half of the movie, where the audience is sure that if something is going to go wrong it will go wrong now. There’s not much time left for something to happen. Therefore the audience is already tense at the start of the scene.
The build-up to when the asteroids arrive is mostly wasted time. If this scene happened half an hour or more earlier in the film, that build-up would have been more effective, since its more believable that nothing wrong could go wrong. Think the highway scene in Nocturnal Animals, as a scene early in the film with tension that nothing could potentially happen.
TENSION AND DRAMATIC IRONY
Dramatic irony is a bit differently defined than the more general use of irony. Dramatic irony is when the audience knows something that characters in the story do not know. Whether that is the true identity of a character, a character’s true motivation or a plot point, its a useful tool that can serve multiple purposes. Its commonly used in comedies as a physical gag of a character disparaging another character while said character is standing behind them the whole time and other similar situations.
However, it can also be extremely useful in creating tension. Think of amy time you have just wanted to scream through the screen at characters to do something other than what they are doing. That’s dramatic irony.
One of the most famous examples of dramatic irony creating tension is in Die Hard, when John Mclean meets the villain, Hans Gruber. Only, John Mclean isn’t aware that this is Hans. The tension is then further ramped up when John hands Hans a gun.
Dramatic irony can also work the other way, where characters know things that the audience doesn’t. Its the moment of tension where the good guys look like they won, but then the villain starts to laugh. They know something that the audience doesn’t. Otherwise why would they be laughing when they are defeated?
The problem with The Midnight Sky is that it does none of these different options for building tension. No one is in direct peril until the asteroids are upon them (after all, there could be no other asteroid shower coming), and the audience knows the same amount of information as the characters. There’s nothing that adds to the tension. No new information or even a ticking clock to add tension. Its all empty space. There isn’t even a question of what is going to happen. We can put together from what happened that if there will be peril, it will come from asteroids.
The sad part is that this could be fixed really easily. It could be as simple as showing another asteroid shower coming in the distance, where the characters cannot see. Or even have one character see the incoming danger and have them drowned out by the playing of Sweet Caroline. Sure that last suggestion would call into question how good the astronauts are at health and safety, but it would bring in some semblance of tension building and peril, unlike the long scene of nothing that we get
PART 2 – AUGUSTINE LOFTHOUSE
George Clooney as Augustine Lofthouse is the fingertips that keep this movie on the cliff of being good. The only problem is that there is not enough of him.
CROWDED ISOLATION
Augustine’s storyline is a fairly simple tale of isolation. He’s alone in an inhospitable landscape, trying to contact people that might not be out there. Except the film never succeeds in making the audience feel that isolation.
Iris is introduced far too early in the film. Instead of getting to know Augustine alone and developing his character, Iris is introduced very quickly, as if the film is worried about how gripping just George Clooney would be on his own. Which is not true.
It is a casuality of a movie that doesn’t really know where is the best place to spend its time. The amount of time and emphasis on the characters on the Æther actively fights the goals and atmosphere created in Augustine’s half of the movie. There’s a strong connection from Augustine to the Æther, with him trying to contact it, but there is nothing coming back. No one knows he exists, or that he’s trying to contact them, or anything has gone wrong. That creates a huge gulf between two halves of the movie and there is nothing done until the very end to bridge that gap.
SPEAKING ON GAPS
There is a lack of concrete measurements on where characters and places are. The Æther is on its way to Earth but we are never sure where exactly it is or how far away from Earth it is. Augustine has to move away from his current location to a different base with more powerful communication systems. The only problem is that I don’t remember hearing or seeing how far away it is.
Vagueness can be effective in building a tension of when characters will arrive at a location. However, where there is no idea how far Augustine and Iris have to go to reach this other Arctic station, its hard to feel tension in the scenes that would otherwise be a lot more tension filled. It would provide a lot stronger feeling of dread if we knew that Augustine still had tens of miles to cross after he fell through the ice, however with no marker to guide us, we don’t know if he still has 100 miles or a few feet away.
THE PROBLEM OF KNOWING TOO MUCH
Early on in the movie, we know that the Æther is okay and safely on its way back to Earth. It takes a lot of narrative heft away from Augustine’s storyline. There could have been so much more drama if the audience didn’t know if the Æther was still out there or not. It could be made a point early in the film that it is late, and there may have been a problem, but Augustine wouldn’t give up on them.
There would have been a worrying throughline of “what if this was all for nothing?” All the hell that Augustine goes through seems much more justified because we know that the Æther is out there. Instead of a man who is embarking on a dangerous journey for a last ditch effort to save humanity that might not work, we know that there is hope. The dark and slow atmosphere of Augustine’s half of the film would have much benefitted from this vaguery and more hopeless feeling.
LACK OF IMPACT
There are a couple of story beats in Augustine’s storyline that lack the correct impact that should be given to them. When talking about the new station that he and Iris are trying to reach he talks about all the food that will be there and how nice it is. However, once they arrive, we never see anything of the station outside of the one room that Augustine is in when he contacts the Æther.
Part of the big twist at the end of the film is that Sully is actually Iris Sullivan, Augustine’s daughter, and the young Iris that Augustine was living with was a figment of his imagination. It doesn’t work well has an emotional moment, since we don’t spend enough time with Augustine alone, and we don’t spend enough time with Augustine and Iris together to feel strongly about this. There are two scenes where Augustine and Iris and eating peas and pushing them across the table at each other, and one where Augustine tries to get Iris to sleep in another room. Its not enough to build up an emotional connection to feel strongly when its revealed that Iris was never really there.
And that is the crux of the problems with the film. Since its so split between two separate stories, neither has the time and space to do what they need to do to make an good story. And its a shame cause there could have been something there, just out of reach.
P.S. THE BOOK
I have not read the book. There is not a ton of information on it online. It doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page. However, I found some information in reviews of the book of a change that the film made. In the book, Sully isn’t pregnant.
This seems like a small change. Just an addition to up the drama on the Æther. That is until you learn about what her story is in the book. She has a daughter on Earth, estranged since she decided to go on this long space journey. Her now ex-husband is estranged from her as well. This is very similar to the backstory of Augustine. He loses his partner and daughter over his obsession to colonize space. This could’ve been a great way to bring the two stories together, seeing how two different people deal with the struggle of family over obsession. Unfortunately, its just another wasted opportunity.
The Sensations of Storytelling 