For all his extroverted personality as an affable mensch, George Clooney, is no stranger to working in a minor key. Nor is he alien to the ideas of moody space films (“Solaris“), art movies (“The American“), or films with an introspective bent. All of those ideas, including something epic and awe-inspiring, appear to be at work in Clooney’s latest directorial effort “The Midnight Sky,” which looks like its melding the scope of something like “Gravity,” to more humanist sensibilities about survival, connection, and hope despite the ways humankind seems destined to doom itself.
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Penned by screenwriter Mark L. Smith, the writer behind “The Revenant,” and based on the novel Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton, “The Midnight Sky,” is about a lone scientist in the Arctic, who races to contact a crew of astronauts returning home to a mysterious global catastrophe.
Directed and starring Clooney, the movie also stars Felicity Jones, David Oyelowo, Tiffany Boone with Demián Bichir and Kyle Chandler, and introduces newcomer Caoilinn Springall.
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Here’s the official synopsis:
This post-apocalyptic tale follows Augustine (George Clooney), a lonely scientist in the Arctic, as he races to stop Sully (Felicity Jones) and her fellow astronauts from returning home to a mysterious global catastrophe. Clooney directs the adaptation of Lily Brooks-Dalton’s acclaimed novel Good Morning, Midnight, co-starring David Oyelowo, Kyle Chandler, and Demián Bichir and Tiffany Boone.
“The Midnight Sky” doesn’t look like your typical sci-fi film. There’s a melancholy tinge that seems to color the film, and it looks like it’s about finding the humanity within us at the darkest of times. “The Midnight Sky” opens in December in select theaters and will premiere on Netflix on December 23. Watch the first trailer below.