Critics reviews

Clooney only works with A-list collaborators like production designer Jim Bissell and cinematographer Martin Ruhe. The result is an uncommonly good-looking picture. But even the prodigiously talented composer Alexandre Desplat is defeated by an unexceptional screenplay.

The Midnight Sky looks beautiful – lone figures cut into the blanket white of a snowstorm, while wolves pick at the bones of a dead civilisation... But once the stakes are established, the film struggles to fill the rest of its time.

The film's narrative drawbacks point to the fact that Clooney is less assured as a director here. He delivers a decent performance as a man haunted by his past, so it is not as if he cannot connect with the material. But the film does not give the other actors much to do.

But The Midnight Sky is a good example of a movie that sells itself short by trying to be one thing — serious, heavy, emotional — when, by all available indicators, it should be more of a thriller, or more ridiculous, or at the very least more fun.

The two action scenes are exciting enough, if incidental to the wider story, but too often The Midnight Sky feels like a giant tombola of incompatible influences.

At its best, the film shimmers with a thoughtful, poetic moodiness. At its worst, it’s pretty damn slow. But Clooney—who also stars, as a crabby, obsessive scientist bearing the comically hifalutin name Augustine Lofthouse—is at the very least a thoughtful filmmaker, and The Midnight Sky is made with obvious care.

The film’s themes of extinction and survival are worthy of thoughtful treatment, something that eludes the ambitious movie as it succumbs to a schematic and sentimental telling that overreaches for a grand gesture and obscures the more meaningful ideas.

Clooney gives a fine, grizzled performance as Augustine, though his sweet and pleasingly subtle scenes with Springall can’t compensate for the lacklustre inter-planetary action.

The film is sleek, if disjointed – it feels like two separate stories have been stitched together thanks to a slightly meandering screenplay – but this simply enhances the suspense, allowing each plotline to live in its own space.

The Midnight Sky is an attractively shot film, with tasteful and, at moments, even beautiful visual effects and a haunting score courtesy of Alexandre Desplat. But the film is also a plodding and deeply unsatisfying genre exercise that’s largely absent of the things that can make science fiction so rich and gripping—namely, a novel hook and a sense of wonder.

For all its determination, though, The Midnight Sky never quite coalesces, failing to connect its two storylines in a cinematic way that might disguise its literary-narrative origins.

Flanked by a strong supporting cast, Clooney delivers a thoughtful reflection on the toll of environmental devastation. It won't replace Good Night, and Good Luck as his best directorial effort, but this quiet, meditative new film is emotionally involving from tense start to poignant finish.