George Clooney's 'The Midnight Sky' Is an Apocalyptic Netflix Misfire

The science-fiction story never figures out what type of movie it wants to be.

the midnight sky
Netflix
Netflix

Back in November, GQ published a profile of George Clooney that included a story about the mischievous actor summoning "14 of his closest friends" to a private meeting and giving them "each a million dollars, in a suitcase." It's a revealing celebrity anecdote: grand in its specifics yet playful in its execution. (The suitcase summons images of Clooney as a con-man in Ocean's Eleven and as a fixer in Michael Clayton.) Plus, there's a humanizing element to the story, a touch of the aspirational to go with the press-friendly display of generosity. If you had great personal wealth, wouldn't you want to share it with your pals?

For a number of reasons, I found myself thinking about the suitcase story while watching The Midnight Sky, Clooney's latest directorial effort and the first movie he's starred in since 2016's Money Monster. Having won Oscars, scored box office hits, and sold a tequila brand for a billion dollars, there's not much Clooney hasn't accomplished at this point in his career. The subtext of the GQ piece, which finds Clooney discussing The Midnight Sky as a "hopeful" film, is that he's largely content with his charmed life. Perhaps that explains the lack of urgency to The Midnight Sky, a project that resembles a fancy suitcase with nothing of real value inside.

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Netflix/YouTube

The movie, a Netflix-funded adaptation of a science fiction novel by the writer Lily Brooks-Dalton, follows Clooney's bearded, cancer-stricken scientist Augustine Lofthouse as he races through the Arctic Circle to deliver a warning message to a spaceship returning from an exploratory mission to K-23, one of Jupiter's moons and a possible place to restart the larger human project. (The story is set in 2049 and, obviously, things are not going great on Earth.) Lofthouse is joined on his perilous journey by a mute girl (Caoilinn Springall), who will strike most viewers as a walking plot device waiting to be deployed for maximum tear-jerking purposes.

The echoes of recent hits like The Revenant, Logan, and Gravity, which featured Clooney as an astronaut, are evident from the start, but, as a filmmaker, Clooney struggles to synthesize those influences and the story fails to generate suspense. This is most evident in the lengthy sequences set on the spacecraft Æther, which feature over-qualified actors like Felicity Jones, David Oyelowo, Tiffany Boone, and Kyle Chandler spouting pseudo-profound dialogue about the loneliness of space travel. In the movie's most bizarre set-piece, the crew breaks out in a sing-along of Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline" during a risky repair mission. The blend of hokeyness and self-seriousness never congeals, and the movie awkwardly pings back and forth between its two parallel narratives, rarely establishing a satisfying pace.

None of this is helped by some stilted flashbacks, featuring Ethan Peck with a digitally-massaged George Clooney voice, and an overbearing score from composer Alexandre Desplat, which fills the movie's many pregnant pauses with syrupy strings. As the film builds to its weepy conclusion, you start to wonder what initially drew Clooney to the project. His best movie as a director, the 2005 black-and-white McCarthy-era docudrama Good Night, and Good Luck, had a similar earnestness and a degree of old-fashioned craftsmanship. But the conventions of the space genre leave Clooney adrift here, floating from one scene to the next in search of signs of life.

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Dan Jackson is a senior staff writer at Thrillist Entertainment. He's on Twitter @danielvjackson.