4/3/2023 0 Comments Midnight sky![]() ![]() It’s the illness that has led him to stay behind, after the observatory was abandoned by the researchers who work there. The character is, in fact, suffering from cancer and has to keep giving himself transfusions and chemo pills. It’s as if the actor had decided, in a bit of overly-thought-out modesty, that he knows he can’t play the grinning frictionless leading-man charmer forever, and so he went too far in the other direction, hollowing himself out, playing Augustine as a sickly stick. Wearing a grayish-white beard and thatchy close-cropped hair, with a girth semi-covered by a flannel shirt, Clooney looks like Santa Claus’s morose philosophical cousin (Kierkegaard Claus?). (There are few things in movies more joyless than watching someone eat who doesn’t look hungry.) There are artfully austere shots of the empty science compound, and then Clooney, looking like someone suffering a bout of clinical depression, skulks into the cafeteria, pulls out his chair and sits, and pokes into his tray of microwaved rations. You know what you’re in for in the opening minutes, where Clooney, playing a man named Augustine, is all alone, like Matt Damon in “The Martian” or the boyhood Ebenezer Scrooge left behind for the holidays at boarding school. I take climate change as seriously as the next non-Republican, but come on! We’ve been getting this lecture from Hollywood since “Waterworld.” It doesn’t pretend to be “fun,” but it’s not like it’s about much of anything either, unless you count the idea that every homegrown-apocalypse film is a Deadly Serious Warning about our ecological self-destruction. But even if not, “The Midnight Sky” is a ponderous movie. It may be that this genre, as I’ve long suspected, is rather played out. Each setting has a way of being less gripping than the one the film has just cut away from.Īdapted from Lily Brooks-Dalton’s 2016 sci-fi novel “Good Morning, Midnight,” “The Midnight Sky” is a dystopian fairy tale for adults, one of those movies in which Earth as we know it has basically ended and we’re asked to invest ourselves in the lives of half a dozen survivors. Unfolding in one of those distant futures that’s just like the present except more glum, “The Midnight Sky” cuts back and forth between two settings: the frozen wilderness of Antarctica, where Clooney plays the sole researcher left at the empty, sprawling Barbeau Observatory and a NASA spaceship named the Aether that looks from the outside like a baroque Christmas ornament as shot by Stanley Kubrick, and on the inside houses a crew of researcher-explorers on a mission that, at this point, seems overly familiar and derivative of other movies. Like Clooney himself, they were alive with personality. Yet I watched it wondering, “Why did George Clooney want to make this movie?” His early films had dash and spirit and verve. Even the silences (and there are many) have a prestige air about them, making “The Midnight Sky” an awards contender almost before it’s a movie. The sheer vastness of the film - especially its outer-space scenes - may fill a movie-spectacle void left by COVID. He’s working on a bigger scale than he’s tried for, and he stages some exciting visual-effects sequences Alexandre Desplat’s score blankets the action in a mournful grandeur. But in “ The Midnight Sky,” Clooney lands in another ditch. Every filmmaker is entitled to a dud, of course, and I thought Clooney bounced halfway back with “Suburbicon” (2017), an acerbic thriller set in a “Mad Men”-meets-Coen-brothers Middle America. A World War II combat heist thriller about art that was stolen by the Nazis, it had a strong subject and a star cast, but it was a weirdly skewed movie that just sat there, as if Clooney’s creative motor had stalled. ![]() Then Clooney made “The Monuments Men” (2014), and he fell off a cliff. “The Ides of March” (2011) caught the postmodern cynicism of our greedy and gridlocked political culture. Joseph McCarthy, with Clooney using the black-and-white cinematography to make the 1950s broadcast-news world (and everyone in it) pop. Clooney’s sophomore effort, “Good Night, and Good Luck” (2005), vividly dramatized the war between the TV newsman Edward R. His first effort, “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind” (2002), had an early Charlie Kaufman script that Clooney staged with attitude and style, getting the audience to buy into a gonzo what-if? biopic of Chuck Barris. But George Clooney, in the early 2000s, took to directing as if born to it. Not every actor who tries his or her hand at directing has the chops to be a true filmmaker in fact, very few do. ![]()
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