An overly long review for the overly long ‘Midnight Sky’this

Posted on January 8, 2021

By MARK VIOLA

I don’t get early screeners of movies, so I don’t get to watch a film until it is released to everyone. In the era of coronavirus (COVID-19), sometimes I don’t watch a movie until well after its release. As such, it’s hard to not hear other opinions on movies, despite how hard I try to avoid them.

Sometimes a film gets nothing but praise, which tends to raise my expectations despite my best efforts, and the film suffers when it ultimately does not live up to the praise. Other times, I hear nothing but negative opinions, which obviously lowers my expectations. Often, in the latter case, I will just skip a movie if I have better options available.

However, there are times when I’m curious enough about a movie to give it a go even after not hearing a single good thing about it. That was the case with “The Midnight Sky,” a sci-fi(ish) film directed by and starring George Clooney.

And, having now seen it, I can say the movie deserves most of the negative reviews, because it is a slow, meandering film that has kernels of good ideas sprinkled about, but can’t seem to get of out its own way to let them grow into something actually interesting. There is, I think, a good movie to be made of this story — based on the book “Good Morning, Midnight” by Lily Brooks Dalton, which I have not read — but this isn’t it.

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