Review of The Midnight Sky (2020) by Abm0 — 24 Dec 2020

Decent story, very good acting, fantastic visuals honestly, but a number of scenes really didn't need to be so slow. We could've gotten the mood the film was going for with just 1/3 of the slow stuff, seriously.

But going beyond all that, the real, deep tragedy of this film is that it highlights once again what a dead-end the American culture and imagination is at this point. All that these depressive U.S. doomers writing scripts nowadays are capable of coming up with are post-apocalyptic stories where the world keeps trying to do business (and war/politics) as usual despite all the evidence of the irreversible destruction it's causing, everything we cared about on this planet nearly or actually goes to hell, and meanwhile we're supposed to believe either in some magical technological solution popping up out of nowhere (Interstellar) or some impossible move off-planet to somehow still "save" our species (meaning just a few individuals with no hope of actually rebuilding the species). The only glimmer of hope in this climate comes from China - even their sci-fi is about global cooperation, not competition; collectivist thinking and efforts, not rabid capitalist individualism (see The Wandering Earth). If we're going to survive this century it will be through massively ambitious Chinese style constructive solutions. All the U.S. has for us now are visions of doom and destruction.