Though he seems to always find himself in the news, whether it’s for his activism or the fact that he sold his alcohol company for $1 billion, it’s been several years since we’ve seen George Clooney on the big screen. Well, later this year, Clooney not only stars in the film, “The Midnight Sky,” but he’s also the film’s director in a sci-fi, futuristic space film that has startling connections to our current state of the world.
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Thanks to Vanity Fair, we have our first look at the new sci-fi film, “Midnight Sky.” The feature tells two distinct stories. The first one is about a crew of astronauts that are finished discovering a moon around Jupiter that is actually potentially habitable for humans. However, when they leave their mission and head home, what they don’t know is that Earth is basically dead. The second story follows a dying man (Clooney), one of the last survivors of a catastrophic extinction event on Earth, at an Arctic research center that takes it upon himself to venture out into the deadly world to warn the astronauts that they should just turn around.
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And speaking to Vanity Fair, though this is a post-apocalyptic film meets a space movie (Clooney described it as “The Revenant” meets “Gravity“), there are certain aspects that are all too timely.
“There wasn’t the pandemic, and we hadn’t set the whole West Coast on fire,” Clooney said. “I mean, the picture we show of Earth [in the movie] doesn’t look that much different than the satellite pictures of the West Coast right now.”
Even though this might sound like a dire, hopeless film, “The Midnight Sky” isn’t going to be a complete bummer. “I wanted it to be about redemption in a way,” Clooney said. “I wanted there to be some hopefulness in a fairly bleak story about the end of mankind.”
“Midnight Sky” lands on Netflix in December. Hopefully, a first-look trailer arrives soon.
