“The Midnight Sky” on Netflix. This review contains spoilers.

So the thing is, I was super into this movie. It has a bunch of stuff I like: space, survival, problem solving, and a grumpy older guy finding himself having to take care of a kid. Because I was so into it, I set myself up. I was deeply disappointed by the ending, which left me feeling sad and angry.

It’s a sad but intriguing premise: a mysterious catastrophe has occurred, rendering the Earth’s atmosphere poisonous. A space ship, Aether, that has been on a mission to explore a habitable moon of Jupiter is on its way back, and must be warned away before landing on Earth.

George Clooney plays a astronomer named Augustine who remains behind at an Arctic station while others evacuate. He’s hoping to transmit a vital message to the Aether. While living alone on this station, he encounters a kid who was left behind during the chaotic evacuation. Her name is Iris, and she doesn’t speak.

Augustine discovers that the antennae isn’t powerful enough: he and Iris must travel further North through dangerous Arctic conditions in order to reach another station.

Meanwhile on the Aether, the crew of five are living their lives, looking forward to returning home. One crew member is pregnant. They have to deal with various problems, mainly debris hitting their ship. The Aether itself is beautiful, with organic-looking supports on the bulkheads, as if a web-spinning spider was among the engineers.

The story progresses somewhat slowly, but I found it absolutely gripping. All the characters are hovering on the edge of survival.

Naturally, Augustine manages to transmit the message in time, and help the crew decide on a flight path that will send them back to the habitable planet they came from. Here is where the story starts to fall apart.



On the flight back, one of the crew members of the Aether is killed. Maya is the only Black woman in the film, and her death serves no narrative purpose except to raise the stakes for the other characters. This is enraging and makes a sad story all that much sadder.

So now there are four crew members left. Two of them decide they want to return to Earth, to an almost certain death. One of them wants to go because that’s where his wife and kids are. This is sort of understandable I suppose. But then, another character is like, “I’m going with you. I want to bring Maya’s body back home. That is the best use of my time.” This is absolute horse shit!! Maya is dead and doesn’t need you anymore. Meanwhile, you’re leaving your pregnant crewmate and her husband all alone, to go back to planet K-23. No discussion of, what if they need help raising the kid? What if something happens to one of them? His decision to return to a dying planet– to likely die himself– instead of live and help his crewmates, is pretty baffling. He’s been with these people for 2 years.

The final shots are of the married couple, quietly piloting the Aether. It’s very much a centering of the hetero nuclear family, as opposed to the found-family dynamic that was going on with the 5 crew members.

There are no queer people in this film. There is no regard for the strength and value of platonic relationships.

To top it off, there’s a reveal: Iris, the child that Augustine has been looking after, turns out to be a hallucination. The real Iris is the pregnant crew member on the Aether, who is Augustine’s grown daughter that he’s never met. This re-frames the found-family dynamic between Iris and Augustive to again be about a biological, traditional family relationship. The hallucination-for-survival reveal felt like a gimmick. It’s been done better, even in other space movies starring George Clooney (“Gravity”).

Augustine’s act of bravery, traversing miles of ice and snow, is now re-framed to be about saving his grown daughter, instead of acting out of a concern for strangers. It cheapens his actions. Wouldn’t it be nobler if he were trying to save astronauts because they were, simply, people?

In my mind, space is queer. Science fiction is queer: it dreams of the possible, of breaking away from tradition and creating new ways of living and caring for each other that includes platonic relationships, crew mates, found and created families. By that definition: this space movie was deeply anti-queer.

Further content notes:
–They claim to know the baby’s gender; I guess these future people don’t know about trans people, or don’t care.
–Blood
–Quite a bit of vomiting, from illness and from zero G.