The Midnight Sky - A Review and End explained (SPOILERS)

 

The bottom of this review contains spoilers and will be accurately marked so you can stop if you haven’t watched The Midnight Sky.

 

It took me two days to watch The Midnight Sky, not because I hated it but because I was watching it with my granddaughter and ten minutes in she said, “Okay, please, enough.”

The ease in which I switched the movie told me it didn’t have my interest either. Yet, I was determined to watch the newly acclaimed movie from Netflix. Directed by George Clooney.

The story was good, it was really good, but it could have been great. Maybe I’ll rewatch it.

The story focuses on two sets. One on the spaceship Aether, one on earth.

Clooney plays a scientist and he is believable. Unlike the movie Geo Storm where Gerard Butler played a scientist and that just pushed my suspension of belief way too far.

In The Midnight Sky an unknown cataclysmic has rendered earth uninhabitable. Clooney, a terminally ill man stays in the arctic where the air is still safe to warn in coming spacecraft not to land. Decades earlier his character discovered K-23 an earth like and possibly livable planet.

Story two is the Aether and the crew. They are returning from K-23, making their way home to deliver the good news. “Yay! We have a new place to colonize.” The crew is likeable and a great cast. The tone and look is a total contrast to earth. They have been gone two years and haven’t a clue what’s going on.

Clooney is trying to reach them unsuccessfully, he isn’t real diligent until he discovers a little girl was left behind when everyone left the arctic. He now has to trek hundreds of miles to a weather station where he knows the radio works.

As I mentioned the story itself is really good. It mixes flashbacks of Clooney’s character’s life, pretty early on letting us know he chooses career over love and at the end of the world regrets it. Maybe ….he doesn’t care about much, but now .. this girl gets to his heart.

There are tense, anxious action moments but the pacing is off because of bad editing.

One of the things that make a good film editor isn’t just the ability to cut scenes together flawlessly, or catch inconsistencies, it is the ability to know what can go and what must stay.

Just because you spent a ton on a set or it looks beautiful doesn’t mean it needs to be in there, especially if it creates a really long sequence and takes away from the tension. Many of beautiful scenes end on the cutting room floor or rather recycle bin. If it doesn’t move the story, take it out.

There’s a scene in particular, this is not spoilery, that they leave the ship to make a repair (You know like every other spaceship movie) that scene is like 8 minutes too long. It took away from the point. The runtime of TMS is two hours, I think it could have been tight at One hour forty.

It has the feel of ‘On the Beach’ only with some hope. I recommend it if you want a movie you can eat a meal while watching. This one affords the ability to glance down at your plate without missing anything.

 

Now … SPOILERS… ending explained.

 

Through the flashbacks, we learn that Clooney has a child with the woman he loved, a little girl he never acknowledged. He chooses a career over love and family and his regrets being alone manifest.

He regrets never meeting the daughter or helping her.

It was pretty obvious from the get go that the little girl, Iris, wasn’t real. That she was a figment of Clooney’s imagination. Certain scenes she isn’t there and not on camera while she should be. Where the filmmakers error is showing the little girls POV when they are outside of a plane crash. Iris is not real so how is she seeing anything. Clooney is inside the plane and has no way of ‘imagining’ what she is doing.

BUT ….weaved with the flashbacks, the second you know he has a daughter, you figure out this imaginary girl is the daughter he never acknowledged, so he is, in his own way being the guidance he never was.

However he actually is. For real.

Once they make it to the weather station he connects with the Aether and Sully (Female) communication specialist. He tells her and the crew about earth and how to solve their problem to get back to space and to K-23. He is their guidance.

She thanks him and when she finds out his name she praises him. Tells him how he was the reason she got into NASA, that her mother was his colleague. And that’s when we learn, her name is Iris and she is his daughter.

Clooney’s character realizes this and gets some resolution. He wasn’t helping the girl get to the weather station to warn Aether. He was getting to the weather station to warn his little girl.

I’m pretty good at picking things up and I did not pick up any clues. But looking back at the progression of Clooney’s story, it was all there. I’ll need to watch the spaceship scenes again to see if they hinted that Clooney was her father. They probably did, but unlike the long tedious outside the spaceship scene, it ended up cut.

Milli Vanillis of the Literary World

 

Milli Vanilli. If you don’t know who they are. Look them up here (Image courtesy of Mental Floss) I’ll wait.

There was a time when being an author was a noble profession. Even with the dawn of eBooks and the ease to digitally publish, people still admired a writer. In fact, there are many who support the Indy writer wholeheartedly. But what if the author you faithfully support wasn’t real? I’m not talking about pen names, I’m talking about an author created to mislead you.

Are they unscrupulous and deceiving or just brilliant business?

For centuries there have been pen names and ghostwriters. I know this, so please don’t toss out defensive examples like Hardy Boys, Patterson, etc. Famous examples don’t make deception acceptable. There are a lot of puppy mills out there, it doesn’t make it less wrong.

Pen names are created to protect the writer’s identity, to say ‘hey, I’m real, I just can’t say who I am’. Those are different. A deceitful variance of such, along with nestling your books under YA when they aren’t … are for another blog. But for now … Milli Vanilli.

The greed of the novelist has made its way into the apocalypse genre with a vengeance.

Today I write about book mills or book packaging companies. There are several types, a couple I dug into, posing as a fake author to get my information. Yep, I played their game.

My focus today is on the ones that buy story ideas, then hire struggling writers to create an absurdly detailed outline for only a couple hundred bucks, then hire another desperate ghostwriter to pen the novel for not much more and they publish it under one of their stock author names. Not real writers that sit for hours and pour their heat and soul onto each page they write. They are manufactured names just like the books.

One in particular company is huge. They call themselves a publisher but they’re producers. But if you look up their titles on Amazon, the publisher isn’t mentioned. These authors are marketed as Indy Authors. Hundreds upon hundreds of books, several genres and a dozen authors.

I saw an ad for one their mill authors., We’ll call her Mary Smith. On the FB ad, people commented that they love her. I wanted badly to tell them she wasn’t real and that book was the work of a half a dozen people who will never get credit for writing a best seller.

They made $300-500 while the producer rakes in the big bucks, and Mary Smith garnishes a fanbase the writer(s) earned in the literary sweatshop.

Just because I ate a steak at Gordan Ramsey’s in Vegas doesn’t mean Gordan made it. He got credit for something another wonderful chef cooked.

Gordan Ramsey is a brand, just like these fake authors. The difference is we know Ramsey’s Restaurant is a brand, readers haven’t a clue who’s real and who is not.

If you’re a writer reading this, and this blog angers you, makes you defensive, or you think I’m writing about you …then perhaps it might be time to reflect. Just sayin’

Never getting credit for creating a best seller you wrote is just as bad as getting credit for writing something you didn’t write.

If your name is on a book you did not write, then in my opinion you’re creating a brand, not a legacy that many of us truly leave behind on the pages of a book.

Milli Vanilli. People were angry, music lovers canceled them because of the deception, readers should be just as angry at these book mills and fake authors.

I was in a band and we had this guy who wanted badly to be a guitar player. He got up there every gig, strummed away, but was never plugged in. Being on stage made him no more a musician than putting your name on a cover makes you an author.

Am I jealous? No, I have my place in this genre and am very content, but there are passionate writers vying for a spot they deserve and will never get because it’s crowded with fake names and wannabe writers all out for the buck.

Am I upset? Sure, I write everything I put my name on. Hundreds of books. Every part of my being goes into my stories. They may not be great, but they’re mine. If my name is on it, I wrote it. There are a lot out there that can not say the same.

Some will call it great business and good for them. Others will call it deception.

Sadly, what can be done? Not much. We as real writers, just have to work harder. We’ll do what our phony counterparts can not do, and that is write books. The fakes will fade, hopefully, like Milli Vanilli, with a tarnished reputation to follow.