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The Midnight Sky Review

A meditative movie that does exactly what it sets out to do

By Jamie LammersPublished 3 years ago 3 min read
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This review comes from my Letterboxd profile, where I review every movie I watch.

You know what, looking at all of the reviews for this movie, I honestly expected it to be liked a lot more than it is. I gotta be honest, this film is probably more of a three-star movie narratively than a four-star one. The green screen is laughably noticeable at times, the narrative is pretty predictable when you really start to think about it, and there are definitely some intricacies between the character interactions that are kind of glossed over here. However, I honestly have to say that I really didn't hate a single choice that this film made, and I even thought quite a few of the choices it made were fantastic. I absolutely adored the exploration of this dystopian universe, seeing the different technology that exists during this time and how it so naturally integrates into the character's lives. I frankly think the cinematography is absolutely gorgeous, and the atmosphere of this movie is really palpable throughout -- you can feel the cold of the poles and the peace of the night sky as it envelops itself around you, and I just adored that feeling.

You might disagree with me here the most, but I actually thought the script was really good. Mark L. Smith had a tough task in trying to establish so many characters on screen in what is, in retrospect, a short amount of time. I don't know how he did it, but he managed to write these characters in a way where you could just FEEL that they had a life before the movie started. You could feel the actors connecting to each other and playing off of each other in the way the script wants them to, and it feels like even though it doesn't do an absolutely phenomenal job of characterization, it does good enough of a job where you can still end up caring about the story that's being told with them. I just think that's amazing. I've also gotta give props to all of the actors here because I also think all of them did a really good job here as well. I was gonna praise Ethan Peck for somehow perfectly impersonating George Clooney, but when researching for this review, I found out that Clooney simply dubbed over his voice, but it was so good I couldn't even tell. Clooney himself, I think, is actually really good here. I feel like subdued performances are always the ones that work best for him, and going over the top with his personality doesn't always hit. This performance feels like it hits all of the marks it should, along with all of the other performances here.

I don't know, guys, I just enjoyed this movie, although I acknowledge that it's not narratively perfect or even all that amazing. In my opinion, though, it set out to accomplish certain goals and it met those goals about as well as it could have and still managed to somehow make me tear up at the end of the film. Frankly, I think if you like meditative space movies, you're going to love The Midnight Sky because that's exactly what this movie is -- a meditative space adventure. It's not trying to be any more or any less, and I think for what it's trying to do, it's a pretty solid film that ends up somehow avoiding feeling like a Netflix film. If this movie bored you, I completely understand that, I just personally felt that all this movie was trying to be was an intriguing little dystopian adventure, and it did that well enough for me to consistently care about what was going on, despite the narrative not always flowing perfectly,

Letter Grade: A-

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