Directing: C+
Acting: B+
Writing: C
Cinematography: B+
Editing: C+
Special Effects: A-

This movie that is supposedly "Gravity meets The Revenant”—as director and star George Clooney has reportedly called it—turns out not to be anywhere near as good as either of those movies. Honestly, you’d be better served just rewatching one, or both, of them. Gravity can be rented on Prime Video right now for a whopping 99 cents; The Revenant for $3.99. In either case it would be a better value than watching The Midnight Sky on Netflix at no extra cost. Clooney would have been more accurate to describe this movie as “Low-rent Gravity and low-rent The Revenant, in alternating cycles.”

To be fair, The Midnight Sky is far from all bad; in fact, very few things about it are genuinely bad at all. It just comes together to a place of competent mediocrity. There’s nothing here that is exceptional, even with a few exciting sequences, some nice cinematography, and some good special effects. One memorable scene involves the loss of a lot of blood in zero gravity. Another has George Clooney barely escaping a trailer crashing through melting ice.

I have a lot of complaints, though. How about I begin with the worst: The Midnight Sky has objectively bad sound editing. Clooney cast Ethan Peck as a younger version of himself for a few flashbacks, but overdubbed Peck’s voice with a digitally altered version of his own voice. I only know it was altered to be a little higher because I read it; upon casual listen, to me, it just sounded like George Clooney’s voice, synced to match up with this clearly very different man’s lips. I found it persistently distracting.

And then there are the scenes with the flight crew, returning in a space ship from a surveyed planet that appears to be habitable, but many setbacks cause a delay in their discovery that Earth has been devastated and is nearly entirely covered in radiation, except for the poles. The scenes on this ship are where the Gravity comparisons come in, with a space walk sequence and at least two sequences traveling through asteroids that cause heavy damage. In sharp contrast to Gravity, which made unprecedented use of the total silence of space to augment the thrill of its space action sequences, The Midnight Sky goes the typical route of adding sound that would never be heard in exterior shots of the crashes against the space craft. Not only that, but in the space walk sequence where the astronauts are repairing damage from the first asteroid storm, sound effects are added that are similar to hearing machinery being controlled under water. It’s very odd.

I do find the story concept intriguing, except that I don’t understand why the script, written by Mark L. Smith (who also wrote The Revenant) as adapted from the novel Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton, refuses to tell us what has caused this global cataclysm. The opening titles, when we meet the solitary Augustine (Clooney) at an otherwise abandoned weather station in the Arctic, merely tell us it’s “Three weeks after the event.” Okay, thanks. I get the argument that what exactly devastated the planet is not relevant to the direct story at hand, except that having the characters never once refer to what actually happened is so lacking in realism, it’s yet another distraction.

The dialogue is also rathere simplistic for what seems to be at hand. I’m not saying the dialogue in a movie like this needs to be filled with techno-babble, but it would also be nice not to feel like the audience is being spoken down to. There are just many sense of balance which Clooney’s film could have relatively easily met, and in every sense it misses the mark.

At least the actors are amenable people with charisma and commanding screen presence. The crew on the returning space ship is made up of Felicity Jones, David Oyelowo, Kyle Chandler, Damián Bichir, and Tiffany Boone. I keep thinking about when this crew is recommended to turn right back to the world they are returning from, and “Do better this time.” Do better? With what? Five people? Were talking inbreeding within just a couple of generations.

The Midnight Sky does get relatively exciting, although it takes a forty minute preamble mostly focused on Augustine’s solitude to get there. That’s too much time to wait. I have a thing about finishing what I’ve started, but anyone else would be within their rights to give up and turn it off. This movie is often very pretty to look at, the performances are solid all around, and it even eventually gets to be both compelling and entertaining. This is all no thanks to any real logic in the story structure, simple-minded dialogue, inept use of sound, and recycled ideas. There’s a few good things to be found here, but it’s so weighed down by crap that it’s too much of a slog to find them. In short, this movie is far less than the sum of its parts.

Overall: C+