The Midnight Sky

I watched The Midnight Sky the other day on Netflix. It’s hard science fiction that tells the story of a lone scientist trying to warn a spaceship not to return to Earth because there’s been a global disaster (never named, but it seems to be a nuclear war).

(These are not spoilers because the trailer tells you this much.)

Now the scientist is George Clooney, and he also directs. Clooney is a talented fellow, so I thought this might be pretty good.

It is and it isn’t. It was good enough to keep me watching, but there are several scientific liberties taken that are serious howlers (and I mean serious to the point that my 16-year-old exclaimed “hey, they can’t do that!”). With considerably more care on this front, this might have been great (and I find it agonizing when a film gets this much right and torpedoes itself with preventable nonsense). It is tautly directed and well-acted, and our characters wrestle with some wonderful questions. The production design is excellent, with a pretty-yet-plausible spacecraft and a desolate Arctic research station from which Clooney’s scientist operates.

But for it to truly take you away, you’re going to have to pretend you know nothing about physics.

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