The sky doesn't need framing

It's been a while since I've posted anything here. (If you're really desperate for my overly wordy writing, you can always look at Extratime.blog, but probably only if you're a Liverpool and/or Euro football fan.) Part of the reason that I haven't been present is, well, kind of obvious. Since I spent most of my time doing movie criticism here and we really haven't been to see any movies since March, 2020, there hasn't been a ton of material to work with. Like most other people, we've been watching a lot of TV, some of which has been really interesting (Boardwalk Empire!) and some of which really didn't measure up (Lovecraft Country.) But tonight I decided to sit down in front of an actual newly-released film in the form of The Midnight Sky on Netflix. It's a George Clooney effort, as he both starred in and directed it, and that's always a draw for me. I'm a Clooney fan both for most of the work he's done and his philosophy on life that he mentioned to James Lipton on Inside the Actors Studio many years ago. I recorded that episode and watched it several times (before the DVR crashed.) I often wished I had the drive and ambition that Clooney talked about in that interview but, at the very least, it made me respect his work even more than I did when I simply enjoyed it. That said, I can't say I'm entirely sure about this one.

The Midnight Sky is based on the novel Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton and I can see the novel structure in the film and its underlying screenplay. Like much modern science fiction since the advent of the New Wave in the 70s, the central focus isn't on the technology but the people caught up in the vortex that it may (or may not) be a part of. In short, it's a humanist perspective that makes most stories more interesting if you're not just interested in laser beams, global catastrophes, and spaceflight. Of course, this is a story about a global catastrophe and spaceflight... (But no lasers!) But what it's really about is one man's struggle with his humanity or lack thereof. The initial lead character is Clooney as Augustine Lofthouse, an astro-something (-physicist? -nomer? It's never mentioned but the crew of the space flight seems super indebted to him for their mission without ever having met him, which is odd in itself.) I say "initial lead" because despite our story beginning at an Arctic observatory and Augustine waving away his colleagues as the global catastrophe ensues, there's a whole other primary locale for our story, which is said spaceflight: the returning mission Æther, on the back leg from its voyage to K-23, a heretofore undiscovered moon of Jupiter which is habitable (Shades of 2010, although this takes place in 2049.)

So, the story is nominally about Augustine and his obsession with looking outwardly, to outer space and new worlds, and inability to focus on the inward: himself, his relationships, and his commitment issues. Delivered in so few words, the story sounds incredibly trite and very overused: Cold scientist (literally and figuratively) discovers human contact is right in front of him if only he'd try. It's also staged against a very grand tableau (the collapse of the old world, the discovery of a new one) that can serve as a metaphor for the need for more empathy in our society as a whole before it leads to our own destruction. I can see how this story would work in novel form, especially if the author was willing to immerse the reader in the emotions and inner thoughts of her characters. But as a film, it really doesn't or at least it doesn't in the manner in which this one is presented.

We have a story that's about the inner struggles of one man, writ large against the disasters happening around him. But we spend a lot of time on those disasters to no significant end. First off, we're skipping between the Arctic and outer space. We have two radically different settings and two completely disparate sets of characters that are nominally telling the same story but really aren't. The struggle for survival contrasted with the casual return home of the Æther is kind of jarring as we switch back and forth. Here's a man struggling with some form of lethal disease and surviving in one of the deadliest zones of a ravaged world... and then there's the spaceship crew eating cereal with holograms of their families. It changes tune a bit when the Æther suddenly veers off course and has to approach Earth through uncharted space(?), whereupon various physical disasters begin occurring off the planet, as well as on.

But if the main struggle is supposed to be one man searching for empathy in trying circumstances, why do we spend so much time with this ship's crew as they battle meteor storms on the way home? There's a ton of action involving smashed spaceships, blood, and Star Trek-style RED ALERT sirens (that are pointedly turned off in an acknowledgment of pragmatism) that really departs from what otherwise seems to be a fairly inward-looking and cerebral story. As jarring as the shift from survival to the boredom of spaceflight is, it's even more jarring to have a story about humanity dropped into bog-standard Hollywood sci-fi action. I mean, I guess the leverage of trying circumstances can explain the transformation of Augustine, but isn't survival in the Arctic enough? Couldn't we have simply had the global catastrophe teaching him how to care about other people? Being alone in the Arctic and delirious from chemo and blood transfusions should be sufficient stress to drive most people to examine their lives. We also need the (exaggerated) dangers of space travel and a new moon around Jupiter to make this happen? Because what ends up happening is that a potentially intelligent and personal story is being hoisted on the massive framing devices of global catastrophe and humanity-saving spaceflight and making both of them seem like they were half told. Did we need both frames to create the window on our story? One already seems like it may have been enough, if not too much. (Global catastrophe!)

This, of course, leads one to question how much the film departs from the book and/or how much is lost in the usual translation between the two media. There's always going to be something lost from the author's vision when you take a 400-page novel and turn it into a two-hour film. Always. Something will be lost. But the danger is also that a studio decided that a movie audience wouldn't appreciate a very cerebral tale about one man's inner self, spaceflight or not, and decided to toss in the usual rock'em, sock'em action in order to keep people watching. And that's where we usually end up in the technical issues.

Most sci-fi stories have technical issues. That's why they're science fiction. But some plot holes are bigger than others and they're only more obvious when they're as large as these two stories are (because this really is two stories that kind of touch each other in various places.) Augustine keeps talking to his young companion, Iris, about not breathing the air or when and where the air is safe. Meanwhile, the catastrophe is referenced several times as being rooted in radiation. The only way radiation would spread through the air is via dust, most of which wouldn't reach the Arctic in the manner displayed and certainly wouldn't be released in ever-growing, perfectly circular shapes as shown on his instruments. Dust travels on wind patterns which go around the globe because... you know... our world is a globe, Trump followers. When I saw the scene of Augustine examining what appeared to be mutated birds who'd suffered the effects of the catastrophe, I thought they were some kind of alien organisms and wondered just how far out (space joke!) we were going to go. Did someone bring back an alien from an earlier voyage to K23? Other than vague "radiation" and "don't breathe the air" descriptions, "The Event" isn't detailed at all; other than it apparently being an accident of some kind.

Also, Æther has to approach Earth from "the dark side" or some such thing, so it's stated that they're "flying in the dark". Other than that being another obvious space joke, there is no "dark side" to Earth. Because it rotates. Like a globe. And there are observatories and satellites on every "side" of that globe that have explored the local environment extensively. There are no clusters of ice or rocks in the vicinity that would create a threat to spacecraft that I'm aware of. It's just a plot device so that some kind of action other than the holographic kind actually happens in one half of our movie setting. Action which is, of course, kind of unnecessary to tell the story, since confronting death in space (just like on Earth!) is superfluous to the plot. This is, of course, compounded when members of the crew make the decision to confront certain death upon reaching home, for reasons that aren't especially clear other than overwhelming depression at the state of affairs (arrived at in a couple minutes of screen time) and a desire to join everyone else on the planet in the depths of that despair. This doesn't even touch on the idea of a perfectly temperate moon around Jupiter (almost five times as far from the Sun as Earth) and the awesome radiation and magnetic fields around that planet (witness Io) that would make the likelihood of said inhabitable orb extremely small.

Again, all of these strange, very human emotions and their consequential actions may be perfectly explained at a reasonable pace in a written novel, but they don't come across at all well in a two hour film. Once again, the problem of moving a story from one medium to another. Aside from all that, there aren't really any performances to speak of other than Clooney's, since he has the most range and material to work with (It's good to be the king (director)) which brings us back around to why all of this narrative was included for a story that is, in the end, comparatively small, despite a broad and well-felt message. Overall, it's not a bad film, but it simply tries too hard (and in too many large ways) to be a good one and mostly fails.

Gravitas. Not quite.

I went to see Gravity today and, for once, didn't feel ripped off by doing the whole 3-D, IMAX, extravapalooza. Multiple sources had insisted on this approach for the full effect and I'm glad to say that they were right. The immersion created by the enhanced formats made what is already a solid film more of a visual experience, which I believe was the intention of director, Alfonso Cuaròn; best known as the creator of the brilliant Children of Men. The basic premise of the film is that an accident has taken place in orbit around the Earth and George Clooney and Sandra Bullock are the unfortunate recipients of the results which makes both staying alive and figuring out how to get back down from 230 miles above the surface quite the pair of challenges.

Good things first: the visuals are amazing, which you kind of hope for in a film like this. The vistas of the planet and the stars and horizon shots can leave you sitting there in awe no matter what else is happening. It's the kind of thing you'd normally expect to see in a more typical IMAX film, generally on the order of National Geographic programming. I could have spent a lot more time just watching the lights of Cairo and the Nile Valley go past the camera and there are moments where that kind of thing happens. I think Cuaròn did an excellent job in transitioning between moments of intensive action and dead, ominous silence, which is the normal condition of outer space. Since this is intended to be a contemporary film, there are no science fiction elements added and the activity of humans in space is reminiscent of one of my favorite Ridley Scott films, Alien. This is work. It's scientific and industrial and often the most important piece of equipment is a power ratchet.

The pace is tense. Even during the "quiet" moments, the awareness that the characters are in the most lethal environment known to humanity is everpresent. Scientific principles of the film's title are at the forefront of what occurs and it's obvious that great care was taken to convey that detail. This is a film about what could actually happen and no amount of reconfiguring the main deflector dish will fix it. Both Clooney and Bullock help this sense of pace by generally reacting in a genuine fashion to their extraordinary circumstances. Clooney's role is the old-hand space veteran and you never doubt that. Bullock is the rookie brought up to make specific alterations to the Hubble Space Telescope and she tends to panic over the environment far more than the veteran, as you'd expect.

OTOH, I don't think Cuaròn was able to get all that you might expect out of these two excellent actors because of one main problem: the story is pretty thin. There's an accident in space and these two have to figure out how to get out of it. That's it. Most people tend to believe that novels make films. In other words, you have a story that has x amount of depth to it and the film will absorb all of that depth, turning half the 60K words into visuals and the other half into dialogue and action. Of course, film history is filled with examples of how a 2-hour film can't possibly convey the complexity of the novel that it's based upon. The issue with Gravity is that its central premise wouldn't even be that compelling of a short story because there simply isn't enough depth to it. It's a very linear equation and there aren't too many ways to explore the personal dynamics of the characters involved because the movie isn't about them so much as it is about the event. If you're OK with that, then it's all good. But I'm normally swayed by story, not how much eye candy you can show me, and Gravity largely doesn't have it.

What it does have at certain points seems either contrived or tacked on. Bullock's character's personal history becomes a primary motivator at a certain point and that was interesting as she struggles with issues that have nothing to do with her current circumstances. But when she comes through that, her newly-resolute attitude and decision to make everything work struck me as very, very Hollywood and not really convincing. Of course, the very limited amount of dialogue in the script outside of official announcements or panicked gasps certainly doesn't help with this and I think Cuaròn was aware of these collective weaknesses and wisely kept the film to a fairly brisk 91 minutes. You can barely get children's movies that are that short these days.

For those of you among the science-inclined, you should have no trouble with suspension of disbelief for the vast majority of the film... except for one key moment which is unfortunately huge in the story and the two characters' presence in it (when momentum is arrested, it stays that way unless other forces are active...) Even my relatively shallow knowledge of astrophysics could pick that out, but sometimes you need to make a story work and Cuaròn did very little papering over such that most viewers should be fine with events as they happen.

So, is it a classic of Oscarian proportions? Eh. No. It was good and, as noted, it's an accomplishment for me to say that I didn't mind throwing down the extra cash to see it in as visually-enhanced a manner as possible. But I also wouldn't say it was "Absolutely cannot miss!" in stature. I saw it mostly because I'm a fan of the director and Clooney and the rave reviews were enough to push me into the theater and, certainly, it will be far more impressive on a 3-story screen than it will even on your 60" plasma, but it ain't like escaping an event horizon.