The Midnight Sky

I mean, it looks great, filmed great, the actors are good but the story... dear god.. what was the point... it literally goes absolutely nowhere.

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.

When writing a script, a book or creating any sort of story-telling medium, every scene MUST have a purpose to further develop the plot, characters, or atmosphere.

The beginning of the movie starts well-enough. The pacing of the movie, atmosphere and the beginning of the plot is set. You fully understand what is happening and have a general idea of what challenges the protagonist might face. However, after about 30 minutes, the movie slows down. A lot.

Each and every scene thereafter is meaningless to the viewer and useless to the film director. Every challenge the characters face is short-term and has nothing to do with the overall story (oh no, I lost my luggage!) It is only until the last 12 MINUTES of the movie, does the story advance albeit very little.

After sitting through the movie for an hour and a half, I was debating on looking for another movie, but I stuck with it. If not for me, then for my readers.

Pass on this movie. It's not science fiction, but more of a B grade movie with great sci-fi visuals. I enjoy slow-paced science fiction (Interstellar, Gravity), but this is not slow-paced. It's no-paced.

Just a mess of disparite scenes stitched together with little or no narrative. The movie doesn't know what it is trying to be and therefore ends up being nothing new or interesting.

I saw this in a cinema as I was hoping it would be a more immersive experience than waiting for it on Netflix. I have fallen alseep three times in a cinema. This was one of those films.

George Clooney is a good actor and director. Good Night, and Good Luck is one of my favourite films. This was just a disaster.

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.