The stars are coming out in The Midnight Sky—and one of them is multiple Oscar winner George Clooney.
The film adaptation of Lily Brooks-Dalton’s 2016 SF novel, Good Morning, Midnight, will premiere on Netflix on Dec. 23. In addition to Clooney, who’s also producing and directing, the movie features Oscar nominee Felicity Jones, Golden Globe nominee David Oyelowo, and Emmy winner Kyle Chandler of Friday Night Lights fame. According to a new trailer, the film will also appear in some theaters the same month:
The book focuses, in part, on an astronomer, Augustine, at the Arctic Circle’s Barbeau Observatory. He stayed at the observatory when the other scientists were evacuated; he soon finds a child, Iris, who was apparently left behind. It appears that a worldwide cataclysmic event has wiped out the rest of humanity—except for the small crew of the spaceship Aether, who are returning from a Jupiter mission. They’re unaware of what’s happened on Earth, but communications technician Sully is concerned that that they’re receiving no radio signals from their destination. Kirkus’ review said that the author is “at her best when writing about the epic settings that anchor the book, as the arctic and deep space give Brooks-Dalton outlets that match her scope.” However, the reviewer also noted that “when an apocalypse is the least dramatic part of a novel, one wonders if Brooks-Dalton might have gotten the same amount of punch with less extravagance.”
It isn’t the first time that Clooney, who plays Augustine, has appeared in a science fiction adaptation; in 2002, he starred in writer/director Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris, based on the well-regarded book by Polish author Stanislaw Lem, first published in English in 1970. Screenwriter Mark L. Smith adapted Good Morning, Midnight for the screen; he’s best known for co-writing 2015’s The Revenant, based on the 2002 historical novel by Michael Punke.
David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.
