Midnight Special ..... is eerie sci-fi with a difference
Film REVIEW : Midnight Special
Midnight Special Is Eerie Sci-fi With A Difference
Sometimes a film comes along that is filled with such brilliant and exuberant ideas that you doubt it can keep up its exhilarating pace for more than an hour. Last year’s Noah Baumbach, While We’re Young, was a superb comedy that tragically collapsed under the weight of its crisp hilarity after about 75 minutes. Cold in July was an unforgettably tense thriller for the first half, but for the second… well, I just can’t remember. It is almost as if everyone in Hollywood can get into the pitch room, but it’s far more difficult to get a full-length, fully formed film out.
Midnight Special is one of these films. It has a delicious cast, a great story, the moody backdrop of the back roads of Texas and the lingering, swampy reeds of north Louisiana. It had a small budget, about £12m, but that was never a problem for Mud, the last film by Jeff Nichols, a sun-soaked update on Whistle Down the Wind featuring Matthew McConaughey as a convict living secretly on a small island in the mud. Midnight Special has the same sense of humidity, the same sense of foreboding, the same gritty power of a small-town drama threatening to volcano into a national disaster or manhunt: and it begins where all the best films begin, which is just moments before Judgment Day.
This happens to be Friday, March 6, according to the eight-year-old Alton Meyer (Jaeden Lieberher), an eerie little boy who makes prophecies for members of a cult in Texas. The cult is run by the child’s adoptive father, Calvin Meyer (Sam Shepard), who presides over meetings filled with men in lumpy cotton jackets and women with plaits. Another director may have been tempted to ham up the oddity of this cult, but Nichols decides to revel in its smallness and its mundanity.
This boy’s life: Michael Shannon and Jaeden Lieberher, as his gifted son, in Midnight Special
Alton may have begun “speaking in tongues”, spewing great torrents of information that the cult wrote down as their “scripture”. But these were not “the words of the Lord”, they are the words of the “federal government”, snaps one of its preppy officers, Paul Sevier (Adam Driver).
What Alton was saying turned out to be highly sensitive government data, which is why he has presumably disappeared and the church is flooded with agents from the NSA and FBI. I say presumably as nobody explains in any detail what this data was or how Alton arrived in the cult. Nobody explains his gifts, although it quickly becomes obvious they are not imagined but real. Nobody says why Alton’s mother, Sarah (Kirsten Dunst), left the cult, although it soon becomes clear Alton may have been abducted by his father, Roy (Michael Shannon).
Midnight Special - Trailer [HD]
A brasher film would be filled with fiddly bits of backstory, scrolling computer screens, people in headsets screaming at helicopters, but for Nichols this is less a film about tech, more about... well, what? For 40 minutes, the focus is almost entirely on the intricacies of Alton’s peculiar condition, a terrifying affliction that means he must wear goggles during the day and earphones at night. A piercingly bright beam occasionally flashes from his eyes, causing him pain and fatigue, but giving anyone who stares into it “comfort”.
Once it becomes clear that Alton has enough power to drag satellites out of the sky, the film begins to lose energy and sag. For a while, the focus falls on Roy’s childhood friend Lucas (Joel Edgerton), who lost contact with Roy for years until he turned up on his doorstep asking for help. The family variously evade the agents and mysterious men, one of whom describes himself as an “electrician”. Eventually, they arrive, dusty and confused, in a swamp — by which stage the film feels as empty and as mysterious as this wide open space before them.
One of the problems is a lack of guiding emotion. In Mud, it was yearning pity; here, it ought to be sympathy for the child. But Lieberher plays Alton rather strangely and coldly, at his most inscrutable during an airless interrogation sequence with Driver. He is an inert little stone at the centre of an otherwise interesting experience.
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Midnight Special is the new science fiction movie starring Michael Shannon, Kirsten Dunst and Adam Driver.
It's tells the story of a father going on the run with his son, only to find he's got special powers and is wanted by the government.
Television channels flicker to life with breaking news of the abduction of an eight-year-old boy, Alton Meyer (Jaeden Lieberher), by a man identified as Roy Tomlin (Michael Shannon).
Viewers are asked to remain vigilant and telephone any sightings.
Inside a hotel room, Roy and his friend Lucas (Joel Edgerton) prepare to move Alton - Roy's biological son - under the cloak of night in order to avoid attracting attention.
A brief pit stop for petrol leads to devastation on an unimaginable scale and reveals some of the little boy's powers.
Back at the compound of a religious cult, which used to be Alton's home, leader Calvin Meyer (Sam Shepard) wants the boy back as he believes Alton will protect his flock from the end of the world.
They track Roy, Lucas and the boy to the home of Roy's wife Sarah (Kirsten Dunst).
Meanwhile, National Security Agency analyst Paul Sevier (Adam Driver) and the FBI try to make sense of Alton's abilities and the ramifications for mankind.
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