Review of The Midnight Sky (2020)
Seen in 2020.
A man dependent on dialysis operates a radio telescope in the Arctic to warn astronauts returning from a newly discovered habitable moon of Jupiter about an unspecified disaster that is killing everything on Earth in 2049.
The mood is nice, rather like “I’m Going to Meet My Brother” (1963). I like how it extends into the very last scene. The AI-CADed Aether (the returning ship) looks pretty good, but the writing is 10% uselessly vague metaphors about real problems, 10% M. Night Shyamalan-style “twists” that add nothing, 20% conventional drama, and 60% science fiction as it was commonly written in the 1920s. The movie is based on a book called Good Morning, Midnight, probably named after “Good Morning — Midnight” (1862), not SF.
The writers’ astronomy is so obviously poor that it demonstrates contempt for the subject: Radio communication between the Aether and the Earth is impossible until it’s instant. There’s an uncharted region of the inner solar system that’s full of unreasonably dense, untracked meteoroid swarms moving at close to the ship’s velocity. Jupiter’s new moon is ready for settlement upon discovery and looks like Colorado. There is no reason for these conceits, yet the SF is not uniformly soft in the conventional sense. At one point, the crew of the Aether discusses a reasonable and hard-SF-compatible slingshot maneuver to get back out to Jupiter, which must be more alienating to a scientifically illiterate audience than speed-of-light communications or realistically sparse and fast meteoroids would have been. It was certainly the right choice to mention and illustrate this maneuver, so why foul up the rest of the astronomy?
The apparent choice of hard SF is perplexing when commonplace soft SF was readily available and more suitable to the writers’ ambitions and skills. It would have been better to go for an obviously soft-SF wormhole premise like Interstellar (2014) instead of a new moon of Jupiter. That would have aligned with the script’s lecture on real exoplanets instead of making that lecture irrelevant, and it would have explained why the Aether does not find out about the problem on Earth within the hour. There would have been no need to go into the details of that plot, but deliberately saying nothing about whatever is killing everything is hopelessly lazy. My sense is that The Midnight Sky got made because SF was the most vital and interesting genre of film in 2020, but there is more to genre than the surface motifs imitated here.
References here: Stowaway (2021).