Reseñas de la crítica

Nichols's dismal inventory of sci-fi clichés—from an enchanted, amorphously all-powerful little boy to a well-meaning but befuddled scientist to faceless, black-helicopter villains and dribbly metaphysics—reveals a disappointing lack of imagination. Which, when yoked to an aggressive, borderline disingenuous earnestness—embodied in Kirsten Dunst's scrunchy-faced performance as a mom worried about her messianic moppet—results in a parable that elicits more annoyance (and boredom) than awe.

There's something (mildly) special about Midnight Special, linked to Nichols' facility for regional atmosphere and un-Hollywood rhythms. "It wasn't images; it was like a feeling," says one cult member, trying to explain Alton's appeal, and the same might be said of this movie – though it's images too, set in the swampy Deep South and taking place mostly at night.

An essay on paranoia politics and religious extremism in the U.S. hinterland done as a piece of highbrow horror-fantasy.

In the end the film has its own peculiar, often marvelous energy. A big part of that energy comes from the script's daring structure. The film begins so deep into what would normally be considered The Story that you might feel as if you stumbled upon a three-hour film at the one hour mark.

Nichols, a native of Arkansas, makes the film's Southern settings resonant. A sci-fi movie that prefers to skirt small towns rather than smash cities to pieces, Midnight Special finds a spare unconventional beauty in its wide shots of dusty Texas roads, scrubby Louisiana fields and shabby tract houses.

As in his own Take Shelter and Mud, director Jeff Nichols's Midnight Special laces a story of filial and marital angst with sudden violence and off-kilter genre trappings, creating, as many have noted, a strange mix of early Spielberg, golden age John Carpenter, and maybe a little vintage Stephen King. Nichols's primary stroke of genius is an almost ruthless lack of exposition.

Like the films that cemented Spielberg's prestige, and briefly supplied Shyamalan with his, Midnight Special is what you might call a "signs and wonders" movie. But it's also a rivetingly smart and levelheaded piece of adventure storytelling, executed with expert tautness.

Nichols' love of empty visual space, present in his earlier films (Shotgun Stories, Take Shelter, Mud), is put to use in simple but effective compositions and contrasts that bring to mind John Carpenter... It's very Spielberg-esque, though if there's an art to not putting too fine a point on something, Nichols is coming very close to mastering it.

Nichols has an easy mastery of pacing and tension, employing a churning sound design (and a pulsing score by David Wingo) that allows moments of occasionally bloody action to arrive with a frightening blast or a deep, quaking rumble of bass. Midnight Special moves with purpose to its final destination, but the film offloads too much baggage along the way.

Midnight Special is exceptionally well acted and often quite gripping and sad. But Nichols can't play coy to the extent that he did in Take Shelter, where he made the issue of his protagonist's mental health largely irrelevant. Here, at least some of the Big Questions have to be answered before the very end, because everyone cares too much about Alton and his powers for him to remain a mere macguffin.

[Nichols] means for us to be enraptured by his images and the allure of movie magic, even as we are not necessarily paying much mind to character motivations or the trajectory of the plot. This strategy has its virtues, and Nichols' aptitude for spectacle keeps the picture in gear for much of its running time, but the lack of any compelling thematic allusions or subtext renders the experience something of an exercise.

Not for the first time, it's Nichols the scriptwriter that lets Nichols the director down. The earlier films often played fast and loose with plausibility at crucial stages, and in "Midnight Special" the finale hinges on a silly bit of business involving access through country roads supposedly sealed off by the military.