Apparently considering George Clooney as scrumptious as a Xmas cookie, Netflix has made a holiday gift of the actor's new film The Midnight Sky to its viewers, dropping the film on the air two days before Christmas. The movie is wholly misbegotten and profoundly depressing as well. The picture simply doesn't work and the performers are entrapped in a predictable and dimwitted script. It's hard to figure out what Clooney and company were thinking when they made this movie -- it's pretty bad on all accounts. The movie embraces a number of science fiction cliches including one of the most time-honored, the motif of the doomed African-American astronaut. On Star Trek, Captain Kirk was often beamed down to the surfaces of alien worlds, sometimes accompanied by an efficient and handsome Black crew-member -- the Black astronaut's plot-function was simple: the poor guy's mission was to be killed or eaten or vaporized by whatever malign life-force inhabited the planet. The Midnight Sky has a scene in which a perky Black woman is sent on a space-walk with two White colleagues -- who do you think the oncoming asteroid is going to hit?
The gloomy premise of The Midnight Sky is that earthlings have so befouled the home planet that a mysterious "event" has occurred resulting in the annihilation of every one except George Clooney. Clooney's character, who has an elaborate guffaw-inducing name -- it's something ;like Alexander Lofthouse --is the sole inhabitant of a high Arctic observatory. Everyone else has been evacuated, presumably to perish at home. The irony is that Clooney is dying of some form of cancer that requires daily dialysis, a process that the movie depicts in disturbing detail. After the other scientists have left, Clooney who drinks whiskey morosely and listens to sad hillbilly music, discovers that a mysterious child has been left behind at the Station -- it's called Barbeau. This little girl is mischievous but doesn't speak. (Spoilers will follow.) To anyone who is even slightly alert it is obvious that the little girl is a figment of the hero's dying imagination. Lofthouse, as we are shown in flashbacks, was a fanatically driven astrophysicist who has misplaced his own soul somewhere along the way. (We seem him rejecting his beautiful girlfriend who announces, dishonestly, the she was pregnant but is no longer -- in fact, she apparently has Clooney's child: whether he is aware of this or not is uncertain. If he is aware of the child's existence, the film engages in a long-con and the reveal at the end is really just a cheat.) Young Lofthouse is played by a Byronic-looking fellow who is vague match for the young George Clooney, but lacks his huge, melting bedroom eyes. Lofthouse reminds himself that there is a mission to a moon of Jupiter, Planet K23, a place that apparently has a breathable atmosphere. This mission is called Aether. (Exactly why Lofthouse would have to be reminded of this mission is mysterious -- as it turns out,. he engineered the mission, discovered that K23 was a good site for human colonization, and was the impetus behind the attempt to establish a base on that planet.) Aether is returning to earth, a very bad idea because the planet is now swathed in fecal-looking clouds of poison gas. Accordingly, Clooney sets out to contact Aether and warn them away from the home planet that is now a death-trap.
The movie operates according to a five-part narrative paradigm. In Act One, the depressing situation is set up and we learn that Lofthouse is dying and everyone on earth is doomed. Act Two involves Lofthouse's interactions with the little girl, a figure that we suspect to represent the hero's own innocent soul long lost under shrouds of workaholic bitterness. In Act Three, Lofthouse decides that his best chance of contacting Aether and warning them away is to trek north to the Lake Hazen weather station, a place where there is a "bigger antenna." Act Four involves the Aether mission and its difficulties in reaching home -- the space vehicle has to traverse an unknown part of the Solar System and ends up getting hammered by clouds of asteroids. Act Five is the reveal as to the identity of the little girl and Lofthouse finally rescuing Aether by warning them to stay away from Earth. (The star-ship uses the old "gravitational sling shot" stratagem to zoom around Earth back to K23, a planet psychedelic with luxuriant fields of yellow grain and brilliant scarlet tendrils growing like ivy among deep pinnacles and slot canyons -- embodying a perfect landscape in which human beings can flourish, one of the characters rapturously declares that "it's just like Colorado.") On the way to Lake Hazen, Lofthouse and his anima, the little girl, encounter a crashed plane with picturesquely mutilated corpses and a dying man whom the hero puts out of his misery. The sequence is a complete non sequitur and exists merely to fill up time -- it has nothing to do with the rest of the plot and doesn't contribute to the film's themes that have something to do with the revival of Lofthouse's noble aspirations after his embittered hermitage alone at the Barbeau weather station. Some wolves attack Lofthouse -- this is totally implausible: what would wolves be doing in a completely vacant, glacial landscape? (In fairness to the film, the movie suggests that the wolves may be a hallucination experienced by the dying hero.) Lofthouse and the child also take refuge in a storage trailer inexplicably lying on the glacier. The pack-ice breaks up and the storage container fills up with water. Clooney loses his dialysis machine which dooms him. He spends a lot of time diving in water under the ice. Movies are made by people who live in southern California, that is, a Mediterranean climate, and the director (and scriptwriter) obviously have no experience with the cold at all -- Lofthouse's exertions in the frigid sea water would, of course, kill him through hypothermia in about ninety seconds. In fact, he comes out of the icy drink and the little girl helps him put on his Arctic gear, quite a trick since she doesn't really exist at all. Meanwhile in interplanetary space, the Aether, with its cargo of humans (the last of our kind) is getting bombarded by asteroids. There are some spectacular Gravity-style sequences of mayhem on the exterior of the space-craft and the poor Black girl gets lanced by an asteroid and bleeds to death in a brutal and gory scene involving clouds of zero-gravity gore floating around her body. The White woman on the crew is pregnant. Probably, the black Captain Kirk commander is the father. Clooney and his writers, presumably, feeling guilty about their use of the tired old doomed Black astronaut trope imply that the child (a girl) will be the future Mother of Mankind -- it would be White supremacist nonsense to wipe out the Negroid race and, therefore, the child is half-Black. The film, of course, skirts the question as to the incest that will be necessary to repopulate planet K23 with handsome mixed race people -- is the Black starship commander going to have to impregnate his own child or will the surviving woman bear a brother who can, then, have sex with his sister to keep humanity alive? The audience inevitably considers these questions -- the same problem arose with Noah and his daughters (and with Lot and his daughters as well): when you're down to a man and a woman and her daughter, it's pretty obvious that the way to the future runs right through incest-valley. The two other men on the Aether inexplicably decide to commit suicide by returning to the home planet all swathed in nasty-looking butterscotch-colored clouds. Having warned Aether to get out of Dodge, Lofthouse can drop dead. A final flashback shows us that the little girl, who never really existed, was Lofthouse's own daughter. As an adult woman, she's the last human womb: the pregnant lady on the Aether. By this point, Clooney looks awful, like a Santa Claus with the DT's, and he dies. The film's ending is majestically terrible: the Black space captain and Clooney's daughter fiddle with their computers on the Aether for about a minute, then, the man gets up and wanders away -- perhaps, he's going to the toilet. (There's no dialogue). The pregnant woman, whom we now know to be Lofthouse's daughter (although grown-up), tinkers with her computer for awhile -- is she watching You-Tube videos?; then, she gets up and wanders off, rubbing the small of her back to remind us that she is pregnant. Maybe, she's going to the toilet too or, perhaps, will take a nap. The camera lingers for another minute on a still life of the computers and the sleek nouveau-Scandinavian chairs and tables: it's not an ending of any kind at all, just some kind of mistaken failure to shut off the camera.
There's so much wrong with this movie that it's inexplicable that the film was ever made. Surely, the star and his crew knew that the script was irredeemably awful. The whole thing is a complete bummer. Christians insist upon the resurrection of the flesh because it's not satisfying to be reborn as a ghost -- for the resurrection to be satisfying, we have to get our bodies back. There's a similar problem with the ending of this film -- so the human race will survive and, even, perhaps thrive and prosper on K23. But K23, even though it's apparently better than Estes Park or Boulder, isn't Earth and Earth and its pleasures are all we know and all we can conceive and so the destruction of our planet in this film just leaves the audience with a profound and enduring sense of misery, depression that would be well-nigh unendurable if the film weren't so risibly awful.
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