George Clooney’s latest feature film isThe Midnight Sky11月,莉莉Brooks-Dalton改编的elGood Morning, Midnight。Clooney stars as Augustine Lofthouse, a scientist at an Arctic outpost when some cataclysmic event occurs which forces everyone to evacuate the facility. It is hinted at being nuclear in nature, thought the cause is not really what’s important, it’s the effect that matters.
奥古斯丁（Augustine）死于未透露姓名的绝症，决定留在后面，并在前哨站曼（En）。The Midnight Skyloves to leave these kinds of details vague, which is fine, honestly. Films too often overexplain everything, but Clooney and screenwriter Mark L. Smith understand that the exact details don’t really matter. All that really matters to the story at hand is that Something Bad Has Happened, and Augustine is dying anyway so he decides to remain behind. Alone in the outpost, Augustine monitors the ever-worsening environment and keeps track of numerous space missions, all of which have gone offline except one: an exploratory ship called the Aether is returning to Earth after a two-year mission to a moon of Jupiter discovered by Augustine.
天空splits its narrative in two (as the novel does), flitting between Augustine on Earth, and the crew of the Aether in space. The crew are so non-descript as to be completely unmemorable, and here is where天空confuses “personality” with “backstory”. (To be fair, it’s a mistake many films make.) We don’t need to know Augustine’s exact illness or what, precisely, happened to make Earth uninhabitable, because we are immersed in the effect of these things. We can plainly see Augustine is very sick, and the opening scene’s panicked rush to evacuate the facility tells us everything we need to know about how bad the situation is on Earth. The occasional updates from Augustine’s monitors underscore this point, too. This is sleek, effective storytelling. Aboard the Aether, however, things go haywire. The crew is basically anonymous to the point of interchangeability. Mitchell (Kyle Chandler) and Maya (Tiffany Boone) miss their family, Adewole (David Oyelowo) and Sully (Felicity Jones) are expecting a baby together. Sanchez (Demian Bichir) can be defined as “Demian Bichir”.
电影中的角色通常充满不必要的背景故事，但是角色必须具有可见的个性。考虑汉·索罗。我们真的一无所知星球大战, except that he’s a smuggler who owes someone money. We don’t know the circumstances of that debt, just that it exists, nor do we know where he comes from or why he became a smuggler or anything else about him that Han doesn’t tell us himself (Solowould come along and ruin all of this wonderful mystery, but that’s for another day). And none of it matters! Han Solo isn’t memorable because we learn his entire life story, he’s memorable because of his PERSONALITY. Characters can skimp on backstory, but they must have a personality to distinguish them on screen, and that is what is missing in天空。At best, each character can be defined by one trait—Augustine is sad, Sully is pregnant, Sanchez is “Demian Bichir”.
Augustine gets a little extra oomph in the character department when he discovers a child left behind at the outpost. Iris (newcomer Caoilinn Springall) doesn’t speak, but she quickly latches onto Augustine, who now must warn the Aether about the conditions on Earth AND care for this helpless child. If you’re even halfway paying attention, Iris’s whole deal is immediately apparent, which makes the third act reveal fall flat, which is another problem for天空。来回的叙述 - 因不必要的闪回奥古斯丁的过去而使他把职业放在家庭上的不必要的闪回，这使得不可能做到这一点天空建立任何动力。电影的地面和空间部分之间没有平衡，因此，尽管每个元素都可以工作，但它们只是不会融合在一起。
It isn’t a total failure, though. Some of the post-apocalyptic visuals are chilling in their simplicity—birds choking on poisoned air, wolves visible only as snow-shadows, Earth enveloped in a dirty cloud—and there is a section in space that, though heavily echoingGravity, is no less effective for it. It’s just that the pacing is off, so it’s impossible to maintain momentum and tension. Like all of Clooney’s directorial efforts since晚安，好运,The Midnight Skyis uneven in its pacing and execution. Parts of it work wonderfully well, but overall天空hangs uneasily together, never quite finding an effective rhythm. The result is a two-hour movie that feels nine hours long, featuring characters you can never quite care about because none of them feel real.
The Midnight Sky将于12月23日在Netflix上流媒体。
