The Midnight Sky Updates: The one about cinema and outer space is a love story that has been written since Mélies imagined us on the moon. Though Kubrick’s most ambitious odyssey or NASA’s most absurd pamphlet, the seventh art has found in the stars a place for reflection on loneliness and the passing of time, from generation to generation of filmmakers. After a first wave, this century of space operas in which Mars seemed to be our inevitable destiny as a human race, the slow pace of scientific discoveries has made the galactic fiction of the new century much more existential. For every “Mars” like the one that started matt Damon, there are several “Ad Astra” , “Interstellar” , “First Man” or “Gravity”.
The Midnight Sky Cast
Precisely the protagonist (along with Sandra Bullock ) of that revolutionary marvel directed by Alfonso Cuarón, George Clooney, returns to address the space drama by taking control, behind and in front of the cameras, of “Midnight Sky” . Orchestrated by Netflix and counting in the cast with Felicity Jones ( “The Theory of Everything” ), David Oyelowo ( “Selma” ) or the man who knows best how to be married on-screen, Kyle Chandler ( “Friday Night Lights”), the film arrives today in a selection of theaters and can be enjoyed on the digital platform from December 23.
The Midnight Sky: George Clooney wants to be cuarón
In the film, for which Clooney sports several regrets and a beard of confinement, we follow Augustine Lofthouse, a doctor who, faced with evacuation from Earth due to the terrible weather conditions in which he finds himself in 2049, prefers to ostracize himself and become the last inhabitant of the planet. Their loneliness will be disturbed by the appearance of a little girl who seems to have been forgotten along the way and by the signal of a colonization ship that does not know the situation in which our balloon is and, therefore, intends to land in the world that no longer has anything to offer them.
That is where Clooney rolls up his sleeves, both on-screen and off, to bring out the best of himself as a filmmaker in an exercise closer to his “Suburbicon” than to the forgettable “The Ides of March.” In a kind of contained double session that, yes, has very little of “Good evening and good luck”, his best work as a filmmaker, the once most famous doctor in fiction intersperses the day-to-day life of the ship that approaches Earth with the fate of him and the girl trying to convey the message not to waste energy trying to return to our planet. In its two long hours of footage, there is time for the frenetic action of unexpected changes in navigation and for more languid scenes in which fatherhood and, above all, motherhood, play a vital role.
Based on the book “Good Morning, Midnight”, by Lily Brooks-Dalton , the film also plays in that league in which more commercial and older productions of the genre were already moving, such as “Armageddon” or “Space Cowboys” and drinks from unequivocal references such as “The day after tomorrow. ” In fact, and beyond the nihilistic void, there is also a severe spoiler in Clooney’s space regarding climate change and its more than avoidable consequences for our very existence.
“Midnight Sky” is Netflix’s umpteenth galactic exercise and his big bet for the technical Oscars, with some possibilities for Clooney in the direction. After the puncture that “Hillbilly, a rural elegy” has meant, the cold reception of “Mank” outside of movie circles and very little news about the success of the film that will be released by the young Zendaya in the next few months, the giant Reed Hastings already has his poker assault on the most desired statuette ready.
