Review: The Midnight Sky

During the pandemic, we now get to watch some theatrical movies from home, and this time I caught The Midnight Sky on Netflix. The trailer's pretty good, so I had to watch -- it looks like good hard sci-fi.

Overall I have good reactions to the movie. I understand where it was going, and I like the ending. But the science turned out to be pretty bad. More on that in a minute.

Disaster has struck the world, and nowhere is safe. Everyone is going to die. Augustine (played by George Clooney), a scientist, is stationed at an arctic observatory. He's got a terminal disease and no one waiting at home, so when his team decides to evacuate, he stays behind alone to hold down the fort. However, he doesn't know that someone else got left behind.

At the same time, Aether, a spacecraft, is returning from K-23, a habitable moon of Jupiter that Augustine discovered. He decides that he needs to contact the spacecraft and warn them to stay away from Earth.

The movie has pretty imagery and cinematography. Most of the acting is top notch, with Clooney carrying most of the cast. The music is okay.

But then there's the science, and what feels like a convoluted setup so we can have the good scenes. 

You may already have questions after reading just my synopsis. "But wait ... why should Augustine need to warn Aether to stay away? Don't they already know what's going on?" Good question! It turns out that when you're too far away, you can't talk to Earth. You have to be within range.

Yeah ... what? We can still currently talk with our ancient Voyager probes that launched into space decades ago. I know there's that square-inverse law thingy, but believe me -- we already got this. We've been able to send and receive signals anywhere in our solar system for a very long time. You may remember receiving pictures of Pluto a few years ago. Well, if you believe this movie -- such a feat would be impossible!

And while Aether is traveling back to Earth, they suddenly go off course -- with no explanation. Does our solar system have hidden gravity wells? And then they must do fancy calculations to get back on course, and go through ... get this ... uncharted territory!!! Ugh. We've got every major asteroid in our solar system mapped. I believe we've got the whole thing covered. There exists no uncharted territory. And when asteroids attack, they look more like big rocks slowly bouncing off the ship rather than super fast piercing all the way through the hull. Also, any moon of Jupiter large enough to support our kind of life would have already been discovered as well.

But hey -- I got to be nice. At least they did get gravity right. That is, it's facing in the right direction, and we even get to see a character changing directions in the middle of the spin. That's a step in the right direction.

Then again, if you don't know that much about science, this stuff probably won't bother you. I was able to turn off the science alarms and enjoy the movie -- the story and the imagery. It's not one of my faves, but at least it kept my attention with no boring parts, and some good story.

So, while you're stuck at home, give it a try. You may like it -- you might not.