BEFORE: Well, I hope that October horror chain felt as solid to you as it did to me, except for the weak Frank Welker link early on. Here's the format breakdown for last month, before I start November's chain, on any and all subjects, including Thanksgiving, the next benchmark:
14 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Salem's Lot, The Witch, The New Mutants, I Know What You Did Last Summer, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, The Handmaid's Tale, The Rage: Carrie 2, Scream, Scream 2, Scream 3, Scream 4, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Hunt, Paradise Hills
2 Movies watched on cable (not saved): Spielberg, Godzilla vs. Kong
2 watched on iTunes: Marrowbone, A Cure for Wellness
1 watched on Amazon Prime: Filth
1 watched on Amazon Prime: Filth
3 watched on HBO Max: Scoob!, Scooby-Doo, Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed
22 TOTAL
22 TOTAL
Wow, cable totally killed it in October - that probably is because I made sure to have all the "Scream" movies recorded off OnDemand months ago, just to be ready. And I really planned the heck out of that chain, I only needed to resort to iTunes to make those key connections between blocks of cable films. And if some cable channel had run "A Cure for Wellness" in their Halloween-themed programming, even that wouldn't have been necessary! "Filth" is on demand now for $3.99, but I watched it on Amazon, so I'm counting it as such.
18 films stand between me and Thanksgiving, so 18 films in 25 days, no problem. (I've got four shifts at the new job, but I'll just watch around them...). And 34 films to the end of the year, 34 films in 61 days, even less of a problem. That's almost 4 weeks of down time, which is great news heading in to the holiday season. Plenty of time for shopping and putting together a holiday mix tape, if I have enough material. BUT first, I've got to GET there, so both Kyle Chandler AND one other actor carry over from "Godzilla vs. Kong". This was originally supposed to be the slot for "Don't Let Go", with Brian Tyree Henry carrying over, but as stated before, that film's been moved to October 2022, as it should serve a more necessary linking purpose there - without that film here, the chain just closed up around it, via a different connection.
THE PLOT: This post-apocalyptic tale follows Augustine, a lonely scientist in the Arctic, as he races to stop Sully and her fellow astronauts from returning home to a mysterious global catastrophe.
AFTER: Before I forget - tomorrow I really have to work out a plan for February, because there are one or two films in the November/December chain that are, well, not romantic, but sort of relationshippy, and I don't want to find out too late that one of them is needed to make the romance chain work early next year. Right now, I could easily move them and find films to replace them, but if I get too far into November, that may not be possible. So, better to investigate this now.
There's some relationship stuff here, like two of the astronauts on the spaceship are a couple, and they're noticeably an inter-racial couple, which is fine, unless that was done by choice to further some agenda, like we'll no doubt see in all the Christmas commercials that are about to air. (Every year there's a theme, either interracial couples or gay couples, who knows, maybe it will be trans couples. Again, I've got no problem with it, except that I NOTICE it, and it would be great if this could be done a bit more subtly, instead of heavy-handedly.). But mostly this film is about loss, and nearly everyone in the film has lost somebody, and we feel all those losses.
But, that's to be expected, because it's 2049 and that bill for all the climate change has finally come due, because there's been an unspecified "event" that changed, well, everything on Earth. They never really get into details, which for a film set in the future makes it feel like some screenwriter is hedging their bets, hoping that by being vague about it the film has a greater chance of becoming more relevant over time. At least "The Day After Tomorrow" went out on a limb and showed NYC freezing over, you know, because the global warming naturally would make things colder. Wait, what? I kid, I think people generally believe that film got more right than it got wrong, and we should all probably watch that film on a regular basis.
But take THAT George Clooney film, and mix it with another one - "Gravity" - and what you get might look a little bit like "The Midnight Sky". Because while Clooney's character is braving the Arctic weather to make it to a very strong radio antenna (the "event" seems to have either knocked out the other antennas, or nobody's left alive to man them, or they're in uninhabitable areas, it's all a bit unclear), at the same time, there are astronauts on the way back from Jupiter who were inconveniently out of range during the "event", and they're probably wondering why nobody on Earth is answering their communications.
Clooney plays Augustine Lofthouse, and apparently it was his idea in the first place to check out one of Jupiter's moons to see if it could support human life, and now the mission is on their way back with their findings. But the Arctic base he works at is being evacuated, as most humans have to go live underground (literally) for a while. (This is kind of like "2010" meets "City of Ember", I suppose.). Lofthouse very inconveniently has a terminal illness, so he's volunteered to stay behind to try to contact the astronauts when they're in range, to maybe tell them not to land. But he finds his antenna isn't strong enough, so he's got to head across Arctic terrain to get to a better one.
The problem is, he's found a young girl in the base, one who was seemingly left behind during the evacuation. Now he's got to care for her, and he can't leave her behind, so she's got to come on the mission with him to reach the other base. Meanwhile, in space, the astronauts heading home have a few problems of their own. And in both locations, people are tormented by separation and loss, and neither dreams, flashbacks, or sitting in 3-D holograms of friends and family members seems to fill the void inside.
They cast a young man to play Clooney's character in the flashbacks, and I'm always fascinated by this sort of thing. They chose not to de-age Clooney, which was smart, and they didn't cast somebody who looks like Clooney NOW, they had to find somebody who you could believe would age into the older Clooney, and I think they made a good choice. That actor just happens to be the grandson of Gregory Peck, and I'm not sure if they dubbed Clooney's voice in for his own, or if he was doing a Clooney impression, but either way, I'm satisfied with the result.
(Side note, last night's film and tonight's film both feature actors who recently visited the theater where I work, Rebecca Hall from "Godzilla vs. Kong" was there to promote the film "Passing", which she directed, and George Clooney was there a couple weeks ago with "The Tender Bar", a film he directed. I was not working when Clooney was there, but I helped set up the Q&A chairs for Rebecca Hall.)
Now for the NITPICK POINTS - first is one that I see a lot in space travel films, there was no communications delay between the characters on Earth and in space, and naturally a lot of films do this, because a film with gaps of several minutes between lines of dialogue just wouldn't hold the audience's attention, but at least that WOULD be realistic. Even with satellite relays, any transmitted sound still has to traverse the vast distance between planets, so no conversation could take place in real time.
Secondly, there's mention of using the slingshot method to propel the spaceship AROUND Earth in order to change direction and therefore save fuel - another nod to one of my favorite films, "2010", perhaps? But in this film it looks like the spaceship made it almost all the way back to Earth, and then came to a dead stop. Yeah, that's not going to work, my understanding is that the ship needs to stay in motion, in order to have the momentum for that slingshot maneuver. But then, I'm not an astrophysicist, yet I know that even in Earth's orbit, a spaceship is constantly in motion, the International Space Station travels at over 17,000 miles per hour and orbits Earth every 90 minutes, so maybe the ship just LOOKED like it was stationary? Relative to Earth? Trying to give the film the benefit of the doubt here, but it's not easy.
Finally, there's a narrative trick here, and I don't want to say which one (#4 on my list of screenplay pet peeves). Just by stating there's a trick, I've possibly already said too much, but you watch it and you decide if it's kosher. Actually there are maybe two tricks involved, the second one is that trick where somebody has to relay just ONE piece of information to somebody else, and then every problem in the world is thrown at them to delay that transmission of information, because as soon as that exchange takes place, it's "movie over". Me, I don't really like being tricked, so that's a point off. Bottom line, this is more coherent than "Ad Astra", but less thrilling than "Interstellar".
Also starring George Clooney (last seen in "A Very Murray Christmas"), Felicity Jones (last seen in "Like Crazy"), David Oyelowo (last seen in "Selma"), Tiffany Boone, Demian Bichir (also carrying over from "Godzilla vs. Kong"), Sophie Rundle, Tim Russ (last seen in "Live Free or Die Hard"), Miriam Shor (last seen in "Hedwig and the Angry Inch"), Ethan Peck (last seen in "In Time"), Caoilinn Springall, Sam Bond, Tia Bannon, Edan Hayhurst, Grecia De la Paz.
RATING: 5 out of 10 bowls of breakfast cereal (and even in 2049, nobody's figured out yet how to keep it from getting soggy)
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