The Midnight Sky

It felt like over 3 hours - and that's me fast-forwarding the uselessly long 15 min outdoor repair/karaoke scene as well as some other long pointless scenes. Someone forgot to hire an editor to at least chop this down to 80-90 min max runtime. This film was based on a novel - was it as slow and boring as this film? It could've been much better with some "Hollywood" added into the writing whilst cutting down/out some of the long dragged out and useless scenes. And the screenplay needed to be tighter and lean more towards one genre; if you separated the "arctic adventure" from the "sci-fi", you may have had two much better short films. Combined, it was a lot of filler, with very little substance. Don't get me started on the very predictable and cliched writing-in of the absolutely adorable Caoilinn Springall as Iris in her first ever role. The awesome score also needed to be toned down, as it was too constant and overbearing - something you'd expect in a B-grade film. The S/VFX, set visuals and cinematography were absolutely stunning. The casting was excellent, but their talents were wasted in this poor story-telling that really didn't require much acting talent. Sadly, it's a very generous 6/10 from me, all going towards the visuals and effects.

A struggle to sit through this tedious behemoth of a movie. Nothing really happens and you feel ripped off at the end. Visually engaging space shots. That's it.

More focus on the arctic journey and Augustine's past & relationship with Iris would have been been way more interesting than spending half the film (and I guess most of the budget) flying a spaceship through asteroid belts and hitting every possible scientific inaccuracy along the way.

I postponed watching this movie for a long time just because of the extremely negative reviews it got on here. I shouldn't have though. I was expecting the worst but after watching The Midnight Sky I can only conclude I was entertained for almost the entire movie. I agree there are a couple unnecessary scenes but overal the rest wasn't bad at all. Okay it's not George Clooney's best movie but it's watchable. The movie got nominated at the Oscars for Best Achievement in Visual Effects. It didn't win, and even though the visual effects were good, there was still better than this one for this year. I can only say you shouldn't pay too much attention to the reviews rating it the lowest possible. Those are from people that watch five to ten movies per year. Take it from somebody that watched thousands of movies, there are uncountable worse movies than this one.

Those that say this movie didn't have a point, completely missed the point. Life, choices, relationships, and death are human experiences, and somewhere along the way we learn, know beauty, love, and catastrophe, make difficult choices, and question our purpose. Enjoy it for what it is.