I have one more movie to go tonight before I post my list tomorrow, but I don't yet know what it will be. I'm returning home from a trip tonight and will select one of a few remaining titles from iTunes.
And boy is The Midnight Sky apocalyptic. I'll give you a SPOILER WARNING in case you haven't seen it.
But first, some context.
It seems appropriate I should be watching something apocalyptic given the year we had, but also in this exact moment in my life. I also happen to be reading a novel called The Last by Hanna Jameson, which is about 20 survivors in a remote Swiss hotel in the immediate aftermath of global nuclear war.
Oh, then of course there was the attempted coup at the Capitol the other day.
The Midnight Sky stars George Clooney as the last man at an Arctic station that communicates with space missions, in the wake of a never-named "event" (nuclear war, most likely) in February of 2049 that has left the rest of the planet uninhabitable, the air toxic. Everyone else evacuates to unknown fates elsewhere. A terminal cancer patient, Clooney stays to keep the lights on, for really no reason, except that here is as good a place to die as any.
Except he does have a purpose, because he has to. There is one more mission still out there, a crew of five returning from K23, a previously unidentified moon of Jupiter, which has the size and atmosphere to support a human relocation from Earth. They were coming back to say yes, indeed, we can start sending people now. Irony of ironies. He just needs to tell them what has happened so they can turn around and go back, but right now his communications are too weak, and it might involve relocating to a weather station that's not so far that you wouldn't try it, but far enough that it seems like really a wasted effort considering what has happened.
After three weeks of solitude, he realizes he's not alone. During evacuation we saw a mother trying to find her missing daughter, only to be told that the daughter went ahead on a different helicopter. I guess that wasn't true, as here she is, unspeaking, holed up in the center along with Clooney, with whom she slowly starts to bond, though still without speaking. Actually, she doesn't really start to bond with him because it turns out she's just in his imagination, and is actually the daughter he was once too swept up in his career to ever meet. We don't find this out until the very end, though.
Before that realization arrives, we spend a heck of amount of time on board the returning spacecraft, piloted by familiar faces like Felicity Jones, David Oyelowo, Demian Bichir and Kyle Chandler. They have a whole series of unrelated adventures like repairing the ship after it gets hit by a field of debris (director Clooney was obviously thinking of his Gravity experiences here). In fact, Clooney's long periods of time stepping away from one story or the other enhances the idea that they are two different movies jammed together into one -- the lonely Arctic mission that seems tainted with certain doom, and the comparatively jovial shipboard interactions that involve group singalongs to Neil Diamond songs. It can be a bit jarring.
Of course, they are both going to end up in the same place, which is: doom.
One of the astronauts dies while trying to repair the ship, and when the remainder finally get in touch with Clooney, two are so despondent that they decide to return to Earth anyway, even though they have no place to land, and even if they do land, no safety to get to. One wants to return to his family, whatever condition they may be in, and the other is older, and kind of goes along for moral support, or really, giving the first a suicide partner.
That leaves only Jones and Oyelowo on board the ship, I guess with enough fuel to catapult back toward Jupiter around the Earth's orbit. Catapulting is something they always talk about in these movies so I guess it must be a real thing.
Jones -- who is Clooney's daughter, it turns out -- is pregnant, so the human species can go on. Or can it? The two adults will live out the 30-40 remaining years of their natural lives on this Jupiter moon -- assuming one of them doesn't fall off a cliff, or bleed out from a simple injury -- but then what's left for that child? To live out her natural life (it's a girl) and then just to die alone on a distant planet, ending the human race?
Bleak.
Then again, I guess "bleak" is where we are at the end of 2020.
The metaphor I liked most was the first 15 minutes of the film, when Clooney is kicking around a 2049 Arctic comms station meant to house several hundred people, gleaming in all its technological advancement but sentenced to rust and decay just like everything else. He feels a bit like a janitor working the overnight shift, only he's cleaning the building for no returning staff the next morning. There's something about him being the last human on Earth -- the radiation would figure to take longest to reach the Arctic circle, I suppose -- and then "turning out the lights" when he finally succumbs. It's the sort of romantic notion of apocalypse I can get behind, if I am required to.
I'll be turning out the lights on my list tomorrow. Join me to find out how I rank all 149 films I saw in 2020.
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