The Midnight Sky WTF is this movie?
By: Justin Ohms
Tags: Science Fiction, Movies, Netflix

I like a good sci-fi movie the problem is that “The Midnight Sky” from Netflix isn’t good.

I am very willing to suspend my disbelief when watching any kind of fiction but there is only so much I can take before the world that the writer has built becomes completely unbelievable. This is the problem that “The Midnight Sky” has.

This movie is set 29 years in the future. Okay, so that is fine. Not so far off into the future as to be really foreign but far enough that space travel, at least inside our own solar system, if not routine is at least common. This fairly short time frame however causes problems. Really 29 years is not sufficiently long enough time for some things to change that much. That brings us to our first problem.

How the hell is there a “missing” moon of Jupiter? The story would have us believe that despite the last hundred years of observation, we in 2020, have somehow missed a moon orbiting the largest planet on our solar system. Now Jupiter has a LOT of moons. Seventy-nine at last count so the idea that there are moons we haven’t found is plausible. However, the idea that we would someone not see a moon that is large enough to support an atmosphere is completely absurd. Ganymede, the largest moon of Jupiter was discovered by Galileo in 1610 along with Callisto, Europa, and Io, and while it is the largest moon in the solar system it still has only 15% of the surface gravity of Earth and is unlikely to be able to retain anything close to a sufficient atmosphere for life. This means that any “missing” moon of Jupiter that could support such an atmosphere would have to be much larger than Galileo, and therefore large enough that we could have seen it 200 years ago. On top of this, any such body in the solar system would have long ago given away its existence by its gravitational effects, particularly it would have certainly interacted with the Laplace resonance between the three largest moons of Jupiter.

Everyone on the planet dies…. somehow??? We never really find out much about the calamity that befalls the earth but the air somehow becomes unbreathable, or something? Like all the air across the entire planet becomes unbreathable all at the same time. And somehow everyone knew it was going to happen days ahead of time. This is just such a ridiculous premise. The maths on this just doesn’t work. The thing to understand that the Earth’s atmosphere is already largely unbreathable. Nitrogen and gasses other than Oxygen make up 80% of the atmosphere. The part we breathe, the O2 is only 20% of the total. People can survive with O2 levels below 10%. This means that the total amount of O2 would have to be cut by more than half. In order to get to 10% Oxygen levels, you would have to displace 50% of the entire atmosphere of the planet. Now of course this is assuming you are replacing with something that isn’t toxic, like nitrogen, carbon dioxide, hydrogen, etc. Maybe it’s something very toxic so that only a small concentration. The problem with this is that anything this toxic would require far more than a plastic breathing mask to keep you safe.

Apparently, there are no space telephones… except when there are. For some reason despite being in our solar system the entire time and with the earth having several days of notice of impending doom, no one bothers to tell the people in the spaceship. It’s as if they couldn’t bother to pick up the phone and say, “Hey don’t come home, the house is on fire.” Apparently, mission control couldn’t be bothered to even leave a message. But some guy's wife remembers to drop the crew a line and tell them the world is doomed.

Tropes, tropes…. So many tropes. Asteroids take out communications just as we are about to get critical information, check. An astronaut dies on a spacewalk, check. The hero must keep his promise to return to his family, check. And probably the worst trope of all… we are left with a proverbial Adam and (conveniently pregnant) Eve heading off to populate a new world.

Honestly, this entire movie just seems like a bit of a hack writing. A lot more could have been done to improve the story. The premise sounded like it could have been interesting but the choices made in driving the story forward are either tired and overused or completely unbelievable if you even have the slightest idea about how science and space exploration works.