The Midnight Sky

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.

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.

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.

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.