Genre: Sci-Fi/Drama
Premise: A lone researcher at a remote Arctic station waits to die after a cataclysmic planet-wide event kills everyone. But plans change when he finds an 8 year old girl hiding within the base.
About: This is a big project that came together a couple of years ago when George Clooney (who will play the lead) purchased the rights to the relatively unknown 2016 novel. He hired Mark L. Smith (The Revenant) to write the screenplay. Netflix won the rights to the project.
Writer: Mark L Smith (based on the novel by Lily Brooks-Dalton)
Details: 111 pages
It’s going to be an interesting review today. For starters, I love Mark L. Smith. I think he’s a great writer. There are a lot of writers out there who’ve got Hollywood fooled. They may have been given more credit than was due for a certain script (because some other writer came in and saved them) and have been living off that lie ever since. Smith is one of those guys who you know is going to deliver on whatever potential the concept has.
On the other hand, you have George Clooney. Clooney has some of the worst taste in Hollywood. The guy is consistently involved in terrible ideas and terrible projects. I mean let’s look at his last five major projects. Catch-22. Money Monster. Hail, Caesar. Tomorrowland. The Monuments Men. It’s pretty hard to be of George Clooney’s caliber and miss this badly this consistently. Remember, the guys at the top get pitched all the best projects. It’s not like he’s Stephen Dorff who doesn’t get to sniff a project until after it’s been turned down by 70 actors. Clooney gets the pick of the litter and still screws it up.
For that reason, I have no idea what to expect. I like when sci-fi delves into dramatic places IN THEORY. But as I’ll talk about in today’s “What I Learned,” it’s a dangerous sandbox to play in.
70 year old Augustine resides at a large Arctic base that is currently being cleared out. People are running over to a fleet of helicopters that are taking them home. We learn that an awful cataclysmic “event” has just happened on the planet and people want to get back to their families, even if it’s just to spend a few final days with them.
But not Augustine! The crotchety old man is taking it easy, Mr. Cheesy, staying up here all by his lonesome. Of course, it helps that he doesn’t have any family and that he’s infected with late-stage cancer. So why bother, right? Up here he can hang out in safety until he dies, probably outlasting everyone on the planet. The irony!
But right after everyone leaves, Augustine finds a little girl hiding in one of the closets. In all the madness, she was forgotten. Augustine is furious because this is not a situation where they can send someone back to pick her up. She’s stuck up here with him. And, oh yeah, the girl never talks.
Meanwhile, we cut to a spaceship called Aether, which is coming back from its failed mission, a mission that Augustine himself created. He thought he found a livable exo-planet right here in our solar system – a previously unknown moon orbiting Jupiter. So the Aether team went out there to see if we could live on it. Long story short: We can’t. And now the crew of Aether is confused because for the last 97 hours, they haven’t been able to make contact with earth.
Cut back to Augustine and the girl (who he’s named “Iris”). Augustine is getting readings that the unsafe air from the “event” has made its way up here. If they’re going to survive, they’ll have to head north to the big station. So they pack up, get on a snowmobile, and away they go. Of course, not everything goes according to plan. And Augustine begins to realize that while he may not be able to save himself and Iris, he can save the crew on Aether. Maybe.
You know the big voice guy at the beginning of every boxing fight? The guy that screams at the top of his lungs, “Let’s get ready to rummmmmmbblllllle.”
Well, imagine that guy is standing next to you as you open this script. But instead of that, he screams, “Let’s get ready to voluntarily go into a depression cooooooomaaaaaa!”
Man this was a depressing read.
Depressing depressing depressing. Oh, and more depressing.
I guess the positive way to pitch this movie would be: “The Road but in the Arctic.” I know a lot of people love that book and some even love the movie.
But here’s my issue with Good Morning – movies without hope are pointless to me. Stories that exist only to make you feel sad or depressed… I don’t get them. I guess there’s the occasional exception. Maybe if it’s a true story chronicling an important moment in history. But if you’re smart, even those movies should have a tinge of hope built into the end.
This doesn’t mean you can’t have depressing things happen in your movie. All good movies have elements of sadness or heartbreak or pain or depression. It’s when those things become the point of the movie and the main emotion the audience is left with that it becomes an issue. At least for me.
All of the plot elements in Good Morning Midnight are working against a good story. You’ve got earth, which has just been incinerated and 7 billion people are dead. Cut over to Augustine, who’s got terminal cancer, coughing blood into napkins every ten minutes. We’ve got this ship heading back to earth with all these astronauts who don’t yet know what we’ve already figured out. They’re flying corpses. And the more we get to know those astronauts, the sadder their lives are (one astronaut tells us their child drowned when they were 3 years old! – yes, we even get a dead child backstory thrown into the mix).
I mean give me one smile at least?
The one dramatic component that gives the story energy is the girl. Because, before her, this dude’s only purpose was to die. But now that there’s a girl involved, Augustine dying means she’s on her own. So there’s a bit of interest in seeing how Augustine is going to deal with that.
[major spoiler]
The problem is, everything about the girl is so suspicious that we know the writer’s up to something. Never saying a word protects the girl from having to be a “real” character, which turns out to be the point. She isn’t a real character. She was a figment of Augustine’s imagination. And because we always knew something was up, the biggest surprise in the script isn’t much of a surprise.
I’d be interested to know if the book kept the characters at the first Arctic station the whole time. I’m guessing it did. But Smith is such a good writer that he knew keeping them at that station was script suicide. To not only base your story around billions of dead people and a handful of soon-to-be-dead people – but, in addition to that – having your main characters, one of whom doesn’t even speak, waiting around inside a base for 120 minutes. I’ve seen traffic signs with more uplifting storylines. At least with those you see a person walking across the road. You know he’s going to get there as long as you don’t hit him.
So the stuff where they’re “on the road” is the best stuff in the script. I liked the wolves. I liked the ice cracking, cutting them off from their vehicle and forcing them to walk the rest of the way. That’s the only time where the story had momentum.
As for the spaceship, I struggled to figure out why we were following Aether other than it gave us the occasional break from Grandpa Depressing and Little Margie Mute. There is an almost-there twist involving the ship that could probably work with a few more drafts. But that twist was the only value brought from the ship storyline. Otherwise it was five people talking about how much of a bummer it was that everyone they knew was probably dead.
So I have a question for the readership here because I felt the exact same way after watching The Road. I thought that was the world’s most depressing boring movie ever. Everyone I talked to would point me to the book. “Read the book! It’s so much better!” So I’ve tried to read the book five times now and each time I can barely get through a few pages without being depressed out of my mind.
My question is, for people who like this stuff, why do you like it? Why do you like to watch movies (or read books) that make you feel depressed and hopeless? Cause maybe this is a good novel, just like a lot of people thought The Road was a good novel, and I just don’t get this stuff. It’s not my thing. However, I’d love to learn why it works for others.
Couldn’t get into this one, guys. :(
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Sci-fi and Drama is a friendship that’s hard to make work. It can succeed, yes. But sci-fi fans like the imagination and the fun places you can go within science-fiction concepts. The heaviness of drama often works to neutralize those fun components. Look at Ad Astra, another sci-fi drama. The two best moments in that film were the opening space elevator accident and the moon buggy chase. Exciting imaginative science-fiction scenes. Everything else was pretty freaking boring. And I suspect it had to do with the drama constantly neutralizing the fun stuff.
