Rating: C
Dir: George Clooney
Star: George Clooney, Felicity Jones, David Oyelowo, Caoilinn Springall
I’m baffled how this movie completely escaped my attention previously. When a friend mentioned it to me, I thought it was a new release. But turns out it was originally released back in 2020. How did I miss not even hearing about a SF film with a $100 million budget, directed by Clooney? Admittedly, it did come out in late 2020 when we were otherwise engaged. But it seems to have left no cultural footprint at all. After watching it though, it makes more sense. It’s not bad, as such, it’s just almost defiantly forgettable. I suspected we were in trouble when Clooney appeared, and Chris said, “Is that guy trying to look like George Clooney?” In her defense, this was before the credits.
Things unfold after a nasty apocalypse has left only a diminishing area of Earth, at the poles, habitable. The sole inhabitant of a polar base is exoplanet specialist Augustine Lofthouse (some guy trying to look like Clooney) – well, until he finds a young, mute girl (Springall), apparently left behind from the evacuation. Meanwhile, in space, the Aether is returning from a mission to Jupiter, where it had been exploring a habitable moon. Lofthouse wants to reach them and let the crew know the bad news, so they can return to Jupiter. But doing so means a hazardous trek across the Arctic to another base with a bigger comms array. Meanwhile, he reflects on his past, and what brought him to this point.
There are three potentially interesting films to be found here. You have the flashbacks to a younger Lofthouse, and how an obsession with his work cost him his partner and their daughter. Then there’s the current Lofthouse, suffering from a terminal illness, and mental strain too, but striving to make a difference by warning the Aether off. Finally, we have the crew of the Aether, including Sully (Jones) and Adewole (Oyelowo), dealing with an endless stream of problems and near-disasters in space. However, there’s no sense of them meshing to create a coherent narrative: any time one of the threads begins to generate momentum, it gets cut off as the focus switches to another thread. It becomes more irritating than engrossing, and I suspect worked better in the novel on which this is based.
The space stuff though is unquestionably well-done, reminding me of Europa Report, and I understand why the effects were Oscar-nominated. There’s a scene, involving body fluids in zero gravity, which is simply something I’ve never even thought about. It often feels like Clooney was taking copious notes when he was making Gravity, capturing the way space is a very dangerous place. Indeed, I kinda wonder how the Aether got to Jupiter and back. The rest of it though? Meh. You’re never given sufficient reason to care about Lofthouse in the present – the little girl feels like an excuse not to have him talking to himself). As a result, his past is largely irrelevant, and the film overall founders on that disinterest.