Review: In 'The Midnight Sky,' director and star George Clooney tells an end-of-the-world story that's stirring and thoughtful

George Clooney contemplates the end of the world in “The Midnight Sky,” a mid-apocalyptic drama that simultaneously touches the brain, heart and adrenal glands.

Clooney both directed and stars scientist Augustine Lofthouse, a scientist who’s the last man left behind at a research station north of the Arctic Circle, in February 2049. Everyone else caught the helicopters heading south, to reunite with their families ahead of an extinction-level cataclysm that’s only described as “the event.” 

Lofthouse has no one in his life — as we learn in flashbacks of a failed romance and a young child he never met — and has a terminal illness, so staying behind seems natural to him. He gets used to solitude, so he’s surprised when he finds a little girl, Iris (Caoilinn Springall), abandoned during the evacuation.

Lofthouse scans the records of NASA (or Space Force, or whatever), and finds one spacecraft, the Aether, still on its mission. The Aether is flying home from K-23, a possibly inhabitable moon of Jupiter, only recently discovered — by Lofthouse in his younger days. Lofthouse knows he must get a signal to The Aether, to warn them that Earth is no longer inhabitable. The research station’s radio is too weak, so he and Iris must trek over the frozen tundra to a relay station with a stronger signal.

Half of the action in the script — written by Mark L. Smith (who co-wrote “The Revenant”), adapting Lily Brooks-Dalton’s novel “Good Morning, Midnight” — involves Lofthouse and Iris’ journey. The other half takes place aboard The Aether, following the daily grind of its five-member crew, and the dangers encountered while flying home. Most of this is seen from the viewpoint of the ship’s science officer, known to everyone as Sully (Felicity Jones, sharp and sympathetic as always).

It’s notable that Sully is pregnant, and the father of her baby is the ship’s commander, Adowale, played by David Oyelowo. Rounding out the crew are Kyle Chandler, Demián Bichir and Tiffany Boone.

Clooney once starred in a TV remake of Sidney Lumet’s 1964 nuclear-war thriller “Fail-Safe”; in this movie, he at one point references a classic of the genre, Stanley Kramer’s 1959 nuclear-fallout parable “On the Beach.” So he knows the stakes in an end-of-the-world drama, and in his portrayal of Lofthouse — a scientist who could see what was coming but was powerless to stop it — he carries that considerable weight.

Clooney also has a sure handle on the technical side, creating a plausible scientific atmosphere both in the Arctic station and aboard The Aether. Scenes involving a meteor shower hitting the spacecraft are as nail-biting as the space station disaster in “Gravity” (another film Clooney starred in).

What makes “The Midnight Sky” work is how Clooney balances between the two quite different survival stories — the one on the ice and the one in space — and gradually reveals the threads that unite them. In the end, they’re both part of the human story, the one that tells us how the species will endure because of ingenuity and boundless hope.

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‘The Midnight Sky’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, December 11, in theaters where open; available for streaming on Netflix starting Wednesday, December 23. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for bloody images, suggestions of violence, and brief strong language. Running time: 118 minutes.