CoVideo On Demand: The Midnight Sky

In this series originally written for The Phoenix News, we review movies that would have been in theatres in summer 2020, but released digitally instead! Today, George Clooney’s Netflix space movie!

This article was originally published in the Kelowna Daily Courier. The original version can be viewed here

The latest directorial effort from George Clooney, The Midnight Sky, is a slow-paced, introspective film that juggles a bit too much to actually work.

Sky follows Augustine Lofthouse (Clooney), seemingly the last scientist left on Earth after some cataclysmic event, as he attempts to contact a group of astronauts and prevent them from returning.

In parallel, Sky shows the astronauts’ return from K-23, a habitable moon of Jupiter, along with all the difficulties their journey entails.

Finally, Lofthouse’s past is shown through a series of flashbacks, which feature actor Ethan Peck in the best Clooney impression in years.

Within each storyline, there are deep, emotional moments in which Clooney gets incredible performances from his actors. A tragedy among the astronauts tests each of the crew members, with the performances of Kyle Chandler, Demián Bichir, and Tiffany Boone standing out.

The flashback sequences depict the entirety of Lofthouse’s most meaningful relationship, with Peck’s gut-wrenching portrayal of an emotionally distant scientist elevating Clooney’s own performance in the rest of the film.

Clooney himself has some great moments after he finds a child stowing away in his observatory (Caoilinn Springall) and learns to open up again.

Unfortunately, there’s also a lot of fluff to Sky. For all the emotional beats to work, Sky spends a long time developing its characters. This leads to several scenes of downtime on the spaceship, downtime in the observatory, long walks in the Arctic, and even downtime in the flashbacks. All taken together, it ends up feeling like Sky isn’t sure what story it wants to tell.

The first act integrates the storylines well. In the second and third acts, though, extended scenes basically only portray Lofthouse’s trip through the Arctic or the astronauts’ tragedy in space. These scenes go on for so long it’s easy to forget at times that the parallel stories also exist. By the time the film switches back, the change is jarring.

At its best, Sky is a reflection on the beauty of life and nature, and the best that humanity can be during a crisis. At its worst, Sky is pretty boring. With its basic narrative of a scientist trying to contact other scientists to get one or the other party out of a bad space trip, it’s easy to draw comparisons to the 2015 Matt Damon vehicle The Martian.

But The Martian used stakes, levity, and excellent pacing to deliver its uplifting, hopeful message. The stakes in Sky exist, but are ill-defined; the movie is remarkably bleak; and the pacing is strange.

Sky is full of great actors, who deliver some excellent moments. Between those moments, there’s a lot of space.

5.5/10