Midnight Special (Jeff Nichols 2014) shows how conviction and technical proficiency can elevate incoherent pulp into a film that is entertaining and, even, suspenseful and gripping. The movie's plot is an embarrassment, but the movie is made with great craft and features an astounding cast: This is a chase movie, fast-paced and packed with alarming incidents, and, if you don't stop to catch your breath and reflect on the proceedings everything seems vaguely plausible. It's only in retrospect that you realize that the plot doesn't make any sense and really doesn't lead anywhere.
A cult named The Ranch live on big farm somewhere in west-central Texas. (It's like a Mennonite version of David Koresh's Waco cult). Although this is not immediately clear, the cult members led by a preacher (played well by the late Sam Shepherd) worship a blessed boy. The boy has magical powers, seems clairvoyant, and emits beams of blinding light from his eyes. He speaks in tongues as well as all known languages and recites numbers that the cult members faithfully record in scripture -- these numbers, of course, turn out to GPS coordinates. The boy has announced that some apocalyptic event will take place in four days. Then, he goes missing -- abducted, for some reason never explained, by his biological father Roy (Michael Shannon looking very gaunt and angry). Roy's motivations are unclear -- he seems to be transporting the boy to the GPS coordinates assigned for the apocalypse. The plot is time-worn: the classic double-chase -- the cult members are hunting for the boy and the authorities to whom his disappearance have been reported have also issued an Amber Alert, that is an APB, for the kid who seems to be about eight. In fact, the story expands into a triple chase when sinister government agencies join in the pursuit, led, more or less, by an agent named Paul Sevier (Adam Driver). After various shootouts and calamities, including an attack by a secret government death satellite (it rains down missile or blasts things with death rays), the little boy is reunited with his mother, Roy's estranged wife (Kirsten Dunst). In the last third of the movie, the boy is apprehended by the government, uses his magical powers to escape by enlisting the help of Servier, and is driven his father and an accomplice, Roy, at high speed to his destiny, an encounter that takes place in the saltwater swamps near Pensacola. It turns out that the kid is a representative of a higher order of beings who live in a world superimposed on our reality. He rejoins his kind, beings of light, and everyone presumably lives happily ever after, although nursing various shotgun and bullet wounds.
The bare recitation of the plot shows that the movie makes no objective sense. How was this magical being born to mere humans? Why are the cult members pursuing him? Why does the boy's father take him to his mother? Why is the little kid horribly ill and, even, dying in the first two-thirds of the movie and, then, just fine for the climax? At one point, someone says about people detecting the little boy: "If he didn't want you to see him, your wouldn't see him." Needless to say this begs the question: why is there a chase with all sorts of gunfights and car crashes? If the kid has unlimited magical powers, then why doesn't he just exercise them and avoid all of the melodrama -- obviously, he could blind everyone to his presence, manipulate the mind of someone to drive him to the proper coordinates, and, then, simply join his divine kind without all the guns firing and tires squealing. The last ten minutes which reveals the full extent of the boy's powers shows us that the whole movie is unnecessary -- the omnipotent kid could just achieve his transfiguration in the salt estuaries by invoking his magical powers and no mere mortal would need be involved. So the picture is a sort of cheat. Furthermore, it makes no sense even on the most concrete levels -- people get shot at point blank range, but somehow aren't really hurt (I think this has something to do with bullet-proof vests). The domain of the beings of light (creatures that are bodiless orbs of brilliant radiance) live in a city comprised of what look like ornate freeway overpasses on which trees are growing and vast concrete ramps and chutes and ladders -- exactly what use do bodiless beings of light make of all this brutalist and vacant concrete? None of this makes any sense at all.
The picture is a mash-up of The Sugarland Express with Kirsten Dunst playing the role of the mother that was performed by Goldie Hawn in Spielberg's first film with elements of Close Encounters of the Third Kind mixed with a half-dozen other supernatural thrillers including aspects of Brian de Palma's The Fury. The plot is unclear even on the most fundamental level -- all the stuff about speaking in tongues and GPS coordinates never coheres into anything that can be deciphered on a narrative level. At one point, Paul Sevier announces that he has figured out the GPS code,but never explains what he has concluded -- although he looks grandly satisfied with his own sapience. But, weirdly enough, this idiotic nonsense is gripping because the acting is excellent -- Kirsten Dunst and Michael Shannon are suitably intense and anguished. Joel Edgerton playing Lucas, a highway patrol cop who has joined the crusade is effectively conflicted as to the various felonies that he has to commit. The henchmen of the Ranch pursuing the little kid are convincingly scary. The special effects, mostly earthquakes that the boy induces when he gets angry and blast of blinding light, are reasonably plausible. The action sequences are well-choreographed although they make no sense in terms of motivation. In the first half of the film, for some unknown reason, the boy can only travel at night and he has some kind of illness that makes daylight toxic to him -- this means that the movie's landscape of low-rent motels and empty highways is always filmed in the dark or just before (of after) sunrise. The kid is cured of his inexplicable photophobia in the second half of the movie and everything is shot in the daylight, but also beautifully filmed. The minor characters are impeccably cast and Kirsten Dunst makes herself cinvincingly plain with hardened features -- she looks like about half the single mothers in the United States. Everyone seems menaced, down-at-the-mouth and disheveled. There are a number of impressive shots, apparently orchestrated with drones -- in one scene, the camera rolling along a rural road in a pine forest suddenly takes flight, lifts up, and climbs above the trees to reveal a vast landscape over which a half-dozen government helicopters are darting here and there like anxious flies -- it's a fine image. The score, an ominous chase theme, is excellent. The fundamental problem is that the film is futile -- in the last ten minutes in which the boy can read minds, knows the future, and has the power of a nuclear reactor, it seems that a humane divinity would just spare the mortals all this muss and fuss and ascend into heaven without making such a mess here on earth.
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