PhantomKnight
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Post by PhantomKnight on Jan 16, 2021 14:07:47 GMT -5
When I think on the directing career of George Clooney, the best word I can think of to summarize it as a whole is "frustrating", and unfortunately, the same holds true for his latest effort, The Midnight Sky. Here is a film with no shortage of potential, yet it can never get off the ground. There are two main plot threads at work here and on their own, you can look at each and see good material springing forth from both. But the problem here is that neither one feels developed enough to be as engaging or exciting as Clooney is aiming for them to be, nor do they work in tandem together all that well. Whenever the movie cuts back to one or the other, it's when one feels like it's just starting to get a bit more interesting. Between the two, I was probably more intrigued by Clooney's half of the story because I kind of dug the tone and atmosphere of that stuff, whereas everything concerning the space crew felt by-the-numbers, almost like it was cobbled together from all the standard tropes of other space-set disaster thrillers...only with not even a third of the excitement. George Clooney may have the best of intentions as a director, but he just can't seem to grasp proper execution. Which is why The Midnight Sky mostly comes off as dull and mediocre and a shell of the movie it could've been.
**/****
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Dracula
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Join Date: Sep 2002
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Post by Dracula on Jan 16, 2021 14:16:14 GMT -5
The Midnight Sky(1/10/2021)
The Midnight Sky would be this year’s biting-off-more-than-it-can-chew science fiction movie and this one was directed by and stars George Clooney, who has at this point made more bad movies than good movies when behind the camera. As a filmmaker Clooney has never been technically incapable but has generally been one of the blandest voices this side of Ron Howard and on a science fiction film like this that is especially problematic. The film’s story is essentially split into two with half of the film following Clooney’s character, who is stationed on an arctic research base in a future where an indistinct catastrophe has set earth careening towards apocalypse. He finds himself needing to travel to another base with a stronger antenna so that he can communicate with a space ship in orbit to warn them about the crisis and needs to bring along a mute orphan child with him. From there we also cut to that spaceship and get a view of how they are dealing with things. Neither half of the film really impressed me too much; the space stuff was not overly creative and is plainly done less well than other recent space movies like Sunshine, Interstellar, and Ad Astra and the stuff with the grizzled George Clooney escorting a kid through the apocalypse essentially boils down to yet another variation on the template set out by Children of Men, The Road, Logan, and “The Last of Us.” That lack of originality wouldn’t be the biggest deal if it was done with style but it’s not, frankly it was kind of boring.
** out of Five
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frankyt
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Join Date: Feb 2007
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Post by frankyt on Jan 28, 2021 15:04:46 GMT -5
Decidedly not good.
4/10
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