The Midnight Sky (2020)
Sunday, 31st January, 2021
Directed by George Clooney
With: George Clooney, Felicity Jones, David Oyelowo, Caoilinn Springall, Kyle Chandler, Demián Bichir, Tiffany Boone, Sophie Rundle, and Ethan Peck
Available on Netflix
Rating: ★★★★☆
I've long been avoiding re-watching The Road (2009), John Hillcoat's movie starring Viggo Mortensen (Father) and Kodi Smit-McPhee (Son), an adaptation of the post-apocalyptic (and brilliant) book by Cormac McCarthy. Few people manage to convey despair quite the same way McCarthy does -- the movie translated it close to perfection. But a painful perfection.
See, I'd been a parent somewhat soon before the movie came out, and parenthood takes its toll on your ability to si(f)t through representations of parental loss and preoccupation emotionally unscathed. You related to movies about relationships with your parents -- I always got choked up with movies where you had parents who were tough, demanding on their kids, but that you eventually learn had been shaped by a tough childhood, exactly like my father was -- but you may not be ready to get destroyed at the notion of a life with no semblance of hope or future for one's own offspring.
The Midnight Sky is a different beast altogether. But throughout the movie I couldn't help but feel the same punch-in-the-gut despair I'd felt while watching The Road years before. While The Road's ending is definitely bleaker -- trying not to spoil it here, watch it if you have the stomach -- Clooney's movie has bleakness in spades, but also dashes of hope.
Understood as a wake-up call for the future of humanity on Earth, you can't help but imagine that 2049 isn't primed for the best, in anyone's book, as it's also the year the 2nd installment of Blade Runner takes place. I'd take Blade Runner's world, anyway. Still, they're not great futurologists, as not exploring off-world colonies or not having flying cars and cool replicants running around in 2019 was a great disappointment to me.
The way you absorb books, movies, and songs is all about optics. I wouldn't dare try to extoll the virtues of The Midnight Sky's film-making, apart from the fact that it seems to be competent. It's large and ambitious -- probably the word I've seen associated the most with this movie.
It has pacing issues, yes. Some scenes are definitely drawn out far too long than needed. There's one scene, a walk in outer space, that got drawn out for so long that its conclusion became almost inevitable, and I found myself tempted to press the forward button to skip ahead, in anticipation. Other characters were built just enough for one to feel some empathy towards their choices, and that was it.
But there's a lot that resonates with me. To me, the movie became all about Lofthouse's (Clooney) and Iris's (Caoilinn Springall) relationship. The visuals of outer space and of the spaceship humanity had sent out to probe one of Jupiter's moons for colonization, they're all spectacular. The spaceship's interiors, 3d-printed by the spaceship itself, give it futuristic verisimilitude. But that's just a pretty backdrop to its central theme.
A quick note to Alexandre Desplat's soundtrack, which is great -- as we've grown accustomed to, when it comes to Desplat's work.
Of some of the most painful choices one has to make, of selflessness, of redemption. And how I wish that, in their unavoidable impact, those choices were all for the better, somehow. For the better of something greater than myself, not in vain.
2049 is just around the corner. My son will be very close to my current age then. And I worry that he's going to be left with a world that's far worse than the one we already have, as much as we're having a wild run right now -- what with the pandemic and the worldwide rise of the far-right.
Unfortunately, I'm not too hopeful for the future of this world of ours, Kiddo. But I hope you make the best of it. And I hope that I get to be there to hold your hand through some of it, too.
