Review of The Midnight Sky (2020) by Randomfrog — 25 Dec 2020

Calling this Sci-Fi would be a horrible insult. Its cringeworthy.

The plot fails on nearly 100% of the scifi points. A huge moon with a biosphere next to Jupiter? Totally. Would have been discovered by Galileo Gallilei..., FAIL. A optical telescope observatory in the arctic? Covered skys, excess water. The worst possible place to build an observatory. A radioastronomy object would have made vague sense. FAIL. The basic idea to not reach the spaceship due to insufficient sender capacity and the need to travel through the wasteland to a weather station instead (that obviously has better deep space capabilities than a dedicated station)? Insane. The size of that thing rivals the Deep Space Network stuff, and thats used to communicate with a 1970s Voyager on the outer rims of the solar system. But a 2049 spaceship with antennas the size of a bus fails to pickup the directed signal?? FAIL. Asteroid belt being a trouble for the spaceship?? FAIL.

A two year mission to Jupiter is also quite rapid, but the spaceship looks like it was a crossover between a Bablyon5 destroyer and a 2010 vessel, so might be okay for a torchship style.

Thats just the obvious science goofs.

Lets talk plot. The ideas are just bland, nothing fresh. The background story is not explained, just some apocalypse with not real details. The characters are boring. Very US focussed characters as well. Global apocalypse but all computer screen displays focus on north america. The plot resolution is also terrible. Just tell the crew to turn back to the new planet. To do what? 10-20 people cannot found a colony, especially not when half the movie echoes "the colony ship didn't make it". Kind of hillarious. The first scene when people get evactuated basically tells "We wanna die at home" and the main character fights so his daughter may die "away from home"...

Do not waste your time. Some FX is nicely done, but most videogames have nicer ship designs, thats about all plus points I could see.