Just the Ticket #106: The Midnight Sky

Merry Christmas to all, Ticketholders!

While working on my upcoming Anime Spotlight, I happened upon an interview with George Clooney where he was talking about his experience on the set of today's selection, The Midnight Sky. According to Clooney (who also directed the film), the scenes of his character in a blizzard were filmed in Iceland, in actual weather conditions. Snow in any volume is a good place to start for a Christmas review, and authentic filming conditions are a good selling point for someone who doesn't want to watch the same movie for twenty-four hours straight.

Unfortunately for roughly half of those who sought out The Midnight Sky this holiday weekend (as I did), it ended up being as big of a waste of time as the alternative, but without the benefit of nostalgia, comedy, or (most importantly) things happening or being explained. Clooney plays a dying scientist of some broad definition who discovered a habitable moon-planet near Jupiter, and is living out his last days in an abandoned Arctic research facility, trying to contact a returning spaceship/station to tell them not to return to Earth because some unclear disaster rendered it uninhabitable between the polar regions, and its effects are still expanding. Suddenly, there's a mostly silent British girl named Iris, turning this disaster-piece into one of those is-she-real-or-not "psychological thrillers." Clooney decides to take her with him when the fallout/disease/EMF/global warming/dust cloud/geostorm/whatever starts getting too close and he realizes they need a better signal from an outpost farther north. At one point in the journey, he fires blindly into the whiteout, making this viewer briefly wonder, "what if she was actually real the whole time, and he just shot her without realizing it?" But no, that would have been too interesting. Instead, we have to endure the further trappings of the hallucination trope until he gets to the new outpost, where he sends his communique and coughs himself to death offscreen.

Meanwhile, in another movie that's supposed to be a series of (by which I mean two or three) flashbacks, a broadly defined scientist (played by Ethan Peck, successfully affecting a deeper voice so as to identify himself as the younger version of Clooney's character) can't commit to his British girlfriend because he wants to find space things.

Meanwhile, in yet another, completely different movie that's supposed to be happening at the same time--maybe--as George Clooney Hallucinates in A Blizzard, a team of astronauts are returning from their mission to Moon-Planet Clooney, while they eat, re-live holograms of their best memories in a shape-shifting room, talk about what to name someone's baby (including suggesting it be the name of a flower, but of course, the cool thing that could have been done with this riveting snippet of dialogue is never done, so it shall remain sarcastically riveting), and do generic, disastronaut things like repair large, fragile, sciencey things in a high-velocity debris field, sing to relieve tension, ignore expert advice for macho, bromantic reasons, and bleed to death in zero gravity. Then, after much time is wasted on this, a female, British astronaut among the surviving crew answers Clooney's broadcast and reveals, against any measure of logical sense, that her name is Iris. How he could have known what she looked like as a child, like many things in this conglomerated, boredom-laden smoosh-grackelancery of a sci-fi rom-dram-ological thrill-saster blizzard fart, is never adequately explained, if at all. After Clooney's transmission goes silent, the credits just roll while we watch adult Iris sitting silently and pushing buttons. I guess this is sort of a clever, subtle joke, as the hallucination of young Iris barely talked and kept walking around touching everything like she was Adrian Monk in Goodnight, Moon, but it took me three days to realize that. The real joke is on anyone who sat and watched this for two hours straight, expecting something to plot, only to realize that, no, this over-assed character study in audience trolling "artistry" does not, in fact, know how to plot. There could have been a decent psychological thriller, had the girl been real and Clooney's character been in persistent denial about shooting her; real Edgar Allen Poe, Twilight Zone-caliber stuff. With the holograms and the speed of broadcast signals, they could have put a time-dilation, advanced technology, Christopher Nolan, Planet Of the Apes kind of a twist on the apocalypse. Hell, they could have made Clooney's character just some clueless guy who eventually discovers what turned the planet to shit, putting a Shyamalan, Hitchcockian spin on his journey.

But, as Albert Einstein once said, "imagination is more important than reality." And, if the year 2020 and the existence of The Midnight Sky are any indication, reality fucking sucks.

F

See you all next time, in A Certain Anime Spotlight.

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Out.