TRANSMISSION IMPOSSIBLE
“GET ME SOMEONE WHO CAN WRITE ABOUT A guy tramping through the snow!” a cigar-chomping producer bellows into his phone. You could be forgiven for wondering if that’s how Mark L Smith got the gig on Netflix movie The Midnight Sky, given that it’s similarly snow-shrouded to his Oscarwinning frontiersman tale The Revenant. But there’s much more to the story than that. For starters, half of it unfolds in the even chillier environs of space.
Based on Lily Brooks-Dalton’s 2017 novel , it’s set in 2049, and centres on Augustine Lofthouse (George Clooney, who also directs), an astronomer based at a remote Arctic station. When a humanity-ending global catastrophe (something to do with the atmosphere) strikes, his colleagues fly off to be with their families at the end.
