Times 2 - UK (2020-12-11)

the times | Friday December 11 2020 1GT 7

The film is frequently

misrepresented as a revisionist

attack on American historical myths

when really it’s about the creation of

celebrity and the illusory pantheon

of Hollywood stars. The most

poignant line comes from Burt

Lancaster, as western novelist Ned

Buntline. “Buffalo Bill, it’s been the

thrill of my life to have invented

you,” he says to an understandably

crestfallen Newman. KM

From Dec 14 on Blu-ray

Will Hodgkinson

welcomes Macca’s return p

James Marriott

has an audience with PMs past p

Carol Midgley

follows Tin Star to Liverpool p

Five years after the profoundly

elegiac McCabe & Mrs Miller, the

director Robert Altman returned

to the western for this fantastically

barmy satire.

Paul Newman is perfectly puffed

with self-regard as the showman and

“legendary Indian fighter” Buffalo

Bill, whose spectacular Wild West

extravaganza (lovingly recreated in

rural Canada by Altman) is joined,

in 1885, by resentful Lakota chief

Sitting Bull (Frank Kaquitts).

Buffalo Bill and

the Indians, or

Sitting Bull’s

History Lesson

PG, 123min

{{{{(

The Midnight

Sky

12A, 122min

{{(((

George Clooney and

Caoilinn Springall

George Clooney

directs and stars in

this apocalyptic

drama — but it’s a

slack-paced misfire,

says Kevin Maher

the big film

NETFLIX

Clooney’s Arctic role left me cold

D

ramatic urgency is

a beautiful thing. In

space movies it’s a

prerequisite. In

Gravity it’s the race

to return to Earth

before the next wave

of killer debris strikes.

In Sunshine it’s the race to reach and

reignite the sun before it implodes.

And in Alien it’s the race to defeat the

creature before it consumes the whole

crew. It’s essentially a race, and its

central function is to propel us past

the drama’s lapses in logic or

psychological realism and through the

preposterous nature of the genre

(what? There’s a monster in space?).

This latest entrant, a pricy George

Clooney blockbuster (the budget is

“rumoured” to be $100 million) about

a space crew coming back from

Jupiter, a nuclear apocalypse and an

old man in the Arctic Circle, has a

conspicuous problem with dramatic

urgency. There is none.

It’s 2049, and as we open there’s

been an “accidental” nuclear

apocalypse. Everyone is dead or dying.

The birds are dead, the air is toxic and

a carpet of killer radiation that has

consumed most of the planet is closing

in on a minuscule spot in the Arctic

Circle. Here, in a deserted observatory,

we find the depressed and dying

scientist Augustine Lofthouse

(Clooney, with weight loss and beard).

He has terminal cancer and only

days to live.

Cut to space, where a Nasa starship,

the Aether, is returning home from a

two-year exploratory mission to

Jupiter. The Aether’s harmonious and

profoundly bland five-person crew

include the kindly commander Tom

Adewole (David Oyelowo) and his

saintly pregnant girlfriend, mission

specialist Sullivan (Felicity Jones).

When they receive satellite images

of Earth’s entire surface scorched

and smouldering they are horrified

and must decide whether to go

back to Jupiter’s one habitable

moon or continue home and

immediately perish.

Augustine, meanwhile, travels

from his Arctic deathbed to a snowy

substation to broadcast to the Aether

the superfluous message that the

Earth’s surface is scorched and

smouldering so they must go back

to Jupiter’s one habitable moon or

continue home and immediately

perish. And that’s it. That’s the plot.

It’s a film about some boring people

deciding whether to turn the car

around while an old man waves at

them from the side of the road.

Without the glue of dramatic

urgency, alas, the elements of the

film simply drift apart from each

other, cruelly exposed. The production

design, for instance, is poor. You

will be so disengaged that you will

have time thoroughly to inspect the

interior of the Aether, which seems

to be filled with plastic garden

furniture and a couple of flat-screen

tellies (not sure where they spent

that $100 million, but it wasn’t on

the set dressing).

The film has three wince-inducingly

awful flashbacks to the tortuous love

life of the young Augustine, played by

Ethan Peck but with Clooney’s

distinctive voice digitally, and

inexplicably, “synthesized” with his.

The direction is also by Clooney,

who has previously proved himself

to be a gifted film-maker (see Good

Night, and Good Luck or The Ides of

March), but is here reduced to rote

cross-cutting between space and the

Arctic that merely underscores the

pointlessness of both journeys. He

delivers a single thrilling “space

walk gone awry” sequence late into

the film, but mostly he’s the victim

of terrible writing.

Based on the novel Good Morning,

Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton, this is

the first screenplay that Clooney the

director has not co-written since

Leatherheads in 2008. It is craving his

polish and purpose. It has been solely

adapted by Mark L Smith (a horror

movie veteran who co-wrote The

Revenant) into a one-note narrative

that bets the house (and loses) on

a feeble plot twist concerning the

true identity of a small girl called

Iris (Caoilinn Springall) who has

apparently hidden herself away

in Augustine’s observatory.

We meet her early in the film, and

from the very first scene, first frame

even, we know exactly who she really

is. Yet the film slogs ahead joylessly

towards the twist-free twist. Worst

of all, the “twist” mines that same

sappy family terrain that’s become

so de rigueur for the modern

astronaut movie.

From Interstellar to Gravity, First

Man, Ad Astra and Proxima, it seems

that no one goes into space any more

without nurturing some pivotal

parental trauma or obsessing over

a dead or long-lost child. Can we just

stop this madness? You can go to

space without kiddie issues. Can’t you?

In select cinemas from today, and on

Netflix from December 23

classic

film

of the

we ek

THE

CRITICS

It slogs ahead

joylessly towards

a twist-free twist

w

p

t

y

Paul Newman as Buffalo Bill