Video: first trailer for The Midnight Sky is released

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In The Midnight Sky, George Clooney can't save the world. But he can save the lives of five astronauts. That is if he can stop them from coming home.

Based on the 2016 book Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton, The Midnight Sky follows Augustine (Clooney) as he tries to contact the astronauts in space and warn them about returning to an uninhabitable Earth. See, Augustine is a scientist and also the last person in the Arctic following a mysterious global catastrophe.

For Clooney, who also directed the film, the story was a balancing act. "It's a trick, this one, because you have to first establish how alone he is," Clooney says. "Then you have to make that loneliness become more and more dangerous along the way."

On the plus side, starring in a film with little dialogue means Clooney could focus on directing. "At least I didn't have to sit and learn lines the whole time," he says with a laugh.

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Clooney recently discussed the film during a London Film Festival screen talk, explaining how they shot on 65mm with the intention of showing it on IMAX.

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The film, which is both directed by and stars Clooney, will be available to stream on Netflix on 23 December, as well as being released in select cinemas in the same month.

The actor plays Augustine (Clooney), a lonely scientist living in the Arctic, as he tries to contact astronaut Sully (Felicity Jones) on the spaceship Aether to prevent her crew from returning home to a post-apocalyptic Earth.

“I have to warn them about the conditions on Earth,” Clooney’s character is heard saying in the trailer. “I don’t know all the details. It started with a mistake.”

The first trailer for George Clooney’s sci-fi drama The Midnight Sky has been released.

The film, which is both directed by and stars Clooney, will be available to stream on Netflix on 23 December, as well as being released in select cinemas in the same month.

The actor plays Augustine (Clooney), a lonely scientist living in the Arctic, as he tries to contact astronaut Sully (Felicity Jones) on the spaceship Aether to prevent her crew from returning home to a post-apocalyptic Earth.

“I have to warn them about the conditions on Earth,” Clooney’s character is heard saying in the trailer. “I don’t know all the details. It started with a mistake.”

Along with a young girl, whose relationship to Augustine is unknown, the scientist must travel through inhospitable conditions to reach a stronger antenna, with the hope of contacting the Aether.

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Things We Saw Today: George Clooney Rocks a Santa Beard in The Midnight Sky Trailer

By Chelsea SteinerOct 27th, 2020, 5:53 pm 5 comments

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We’re 8 months into the pandemic, and thankfully, Netflix hasn’t run out of original programming yet. The streaming giant dropped the trailer for The Midnight Sky, a sci-fi drama directed by and starring George Clooney (and his beard). Based on Lily Brooks-Dalton’s acclaimed 2016 novel Good Morning, Midnight, the film follows Augustine (Clooney) a lonely scientist holed up in the Arctic after surviving a global catastrophe.

Augustine and another survivor, a little girl named Iris (Caoilinn Springall), try to make contact with the space ship Aether, an exploratory mission to find other habitable planets. Aether is run by an astronaut named Sully (Felicity Jones aka Jyn Erso), with a crew made up of David Oyelowo, Kyle Chandler, Demián Bichir, and Tiffany Boone.

Clooney has already proven his directing chops, and this will be his first film since 2017’s Suburbicon. The trailer features lots of snow, adrift astronauts, and of course, George Clooney’s silver fox meets Santa Claus beard. What’s not to like? Given its pedigree, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the film become a major awards contender, if awards are in fact still a thing in 2021. Who knows what the future holds!?!

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George Clooney’s “The Midnight Sky” Might Be Perfect Apocalyptic Holiday Fare
Posted on October 27, 2020

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This Christmas, settle down on the couch with the fam and enjoy the apocalypse!
 
 
We’re just being bitches because… well…we’re bitches. But this actually does look pretty fantastic. George Clooney can be a thoughtful director and there’s obviously a 21st century audience for another Sad Astronaut movie since Hollywood keeps returning to the theme. We wonder how much film and culture historians of the future will explore why we were so obsessed with astronauts at this time, although the facile reading would posit that everyone is worried about the end of the world and just wants to escape the bonds of earth.

To be fair, the spacebound portion of the film looks to be a little less important than Clooney’s earthbound journey, complete with adorable moppet in tow. Clooney’s sort of like the male Nicole Kidman in that he subverts his movie star looks to play men who look like they should be standing astride the world but are instead at the end of their rope. He’s at his best when he’s playing someone broken and defeated.

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And you really can’t argue with that cast. We suppose this would have been better served by a theatrical release because the effects and art direction look pretty stunning, but considering how strange this upcoming holiday season is likely to be, this should do well – however that’s defined in Netflix terms. We know we’ll be catching it.

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At The End Of The World, It’s Only Us & George Clooney’s Snow Beard
NATALIE MORIN
LAST UPDATED OCTOBER 28, 2020, 7:30 PM

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PHOTO: COURTESY OF NETFLIX.

Netflix’s upcoming sci-fi drama “The Midnight Sky” imagines a future post-apocalyptic Earth on which George Clooney is one of the only survivors (honestly, who would complain?).

In the Clooney-helmed film, based on Lily Brooks-Dalton’s book Good Morning, Midnight, the Academy Award-winning actor plays a scientist named Augustine living in Antarctica who believes he is the only survivor after a global apocalypse — that is, until he comes across a young girl named Iris (Caoilinn Springall). 

The trailer sees Augustine travel through treacherous terrain (Clooney's snow beard is truly something) in order to get to an antenna that he hopes will help him contact the crew aboard the NASA spaceship Aether (Felicity Jones, David Oyelowo, Tiffany Boone, Kyle Chandler, and Demián Bichir). The astronauts were sent on a mission to find life on other planets, but they have no idea that while they've been gone, their home has suffered a catastrophic event.

The film was shot before a global catastrophe rocked the real world, but now seems painfully more relevant. “It’s science fiction, which unfortunately is less fictional as we move through the days,” Clooney told Vanity Fair. “The sickness of hate and the elements that come from that, battles and wars — that has been percolating for quite some time.”

But fortunately, Clooney said that it isn't all about taking a look at our depressing future. “I wanted it to be about redemption in a way,” he said. “I wanted there to be some hopefulness in a fairly bleak story about the end of mankind.”

“The Midnight Sky” will premiere in select theaters and on Netflix on December 23.

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Who needs nightmares like George Clooney's The Midnight Sky when there's the news?
Post-apocalyptic sci-fi used to be cosy fun, like getting in from the freezing misery of a January day and snuggling down in the knowledge that, in another life, you’d still be out there shivering in torment. It’s meant to be a glimpse into a future that almost certainly won’t take place, a vision of someone else’s horrifying existence that makes us feel better about our own average lives.
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And yet, watching the new trailer for George Clooney’s Oscar-bait sci-fi drama The Midnight Sky, it struck me that this is exactly the kind of movie that, in a pandemic-torn world struggling with rightwing populism and imminent environmental meltdown, is about as cosy as plunging into a bath full of ice and cut glass.
The film sees poor old George – in beardy, underplayed Syriana mode – struggling to get a message out to a group of astronauts that they might be better off staying up in space given that something terrible has happened back home. The promo hints at plenty of trudging through snow and probably some kind of heroic sacrifice, perhaps allowing the continuation of human civilisation beyond Earth’s borders. Though quite what future that would be, given that the planet appears to have suffered some kind of nuclear apocalypse, iwe don’t know.

Clooney has described the movie as a cross between Gravity and The Revenant, but it also recalls the hard-to-watch John Hillcoat drama The Road, with perhaps a hint of Snowpiercer. The only cheery thing about The Midnight Sky is the waggish musing in some parts that the white-bearded Clooney might be playing a sort-of real-life Santa, spreading joy and the gift of not dying a horrible death from radiation poisoning to the remnants of mankind from his dinky Arctic base. But this is not the rosy-cheeked little Saint Nick from Elf or the Santa Clause movies.

The trailer for The Midnight Sky arrives at the same time as news of potential reboots for two less sombre sci-fi stalwarts. Legendary Pictures wants to bring back Buck Rogers, an intriguing blend of space opera and post-apocalyptic sci-fi whose 1979 film (a TV pilot) and subsequent two-season run is fondly remembered by fans. Then there’s the long-mooted film version of Battlestar Galactica, which in its latest configuration has X-Men boss Simon Kinberg on board as writer-producer.


The latter also has elements of post-apocalyptic futurism. Although it is about humans who initially appear to have no connection to Earth, it is very much in the “mankind v machine uprising” mode. The 2004 TV reboot of Glen A Larson’s short-lived late 70s show, which arrived during the so-called war on terror, intelligently played on contemporary concerns about torture and mistreatment of enemy combatants. It asked smart questions about the nature of sentience and the soul, though flagged after a bravura first season.

How successful are new film reboots likely to be? Buck Rogers will face a struggle to balance its hard sci-fi and pulpy space thriller elements, and yet any saga that helped to popularise ray guns and cosmic space adventure ought to find its 21st-century audience. Battlestar Galactica seems better suited to TV than film, with its continuing search for a new home planet for the ragtag survivors of the machine apocalypse: no previous version has solved the puzzle of what happens once the humans have escaped their Cylon adversaries.

In post-apocalyptic terms, these fantasies are surely the kind of movies that will warm the cockles as we hunker down for more lockdown with one hopeful eye on the US presidential election, amid the nagging fear that the world’s leading narcissist might do something really crazy if he loses this time. Films such as The Midnight Sky seem a little too chilling and close to home for comfort.

Yet one of the most popular movies on Netflix at the height of the first wave of Covid-19, was the 2011 pandemic thriller Contagion, which suggests confronting the horror of one’s realities can give a thrill. But give me a good ray gun and some swashbuckling cosmic heroism any day when we only have to turn on the news to feel truly terrified.