Grade: B
Midnight Special is an interesting film about a young boy with special powers who a cult sees as a prophet, the government sees as a threat and who’s parents just want to help him get away and get back home again. The movie is good if it seems like it’s a mashup of other movies that have come before with writer/director Jeff Nichols trying to insert a bit of depth to the whole thing while removing some of the fantastical/sci-fi elements. But I think this is what keeps Midnight Special from being a great film and instead makes it simply a good one.
Midnight Special almost starts in the middle of the story, with the beginning bits of why the characters are on the run and what powers the kid has being revealed via characters interactions and dialog. Here, father Roy (Michael Shannon) and son with powers Alton (Jaeden Lieberher) along with Roy’s old friend Lucas (Joel Edgerton) are on the run from the cult both were raised in all the while trying to get to some location Alton needs to get to with Amber Alert’s and police dodging them along their way. Alton is an odd boy who’s sun phobic and wears googles and earmuffs all the time. But he can also do things like pull and decrypt signals out of the air, literally drag satellites out of orbit and with these weird glowing eyes to “show” people things. Along the way they pickup Alton’s mother Sarah (Kirsten Dunst) and come under the scrutiny of NSA analyst Sevier (Adam Driver) as the government races to find the boy before he causes even more damage.
Midnight Special is essentially an update of the John Carpenter Starman movie but with a 21st century vibe. Both movies feature an otherworldly person, played by Jeff Bridges in Starman, and a few regular people racing across the country to try and get to a location before it’s too late. Now I’m not saying that Midnight Special is a copy Starman, but they both have essentially the same underlying plot.
I’d say Midnight Special is a good movie if at times there’s a few too many things going on at once. Like there’s members of the cult chasing Alton’s group and they seem to be important characters in the movie, until they’re not anymore and are gone from the story. And the whole Sevier government agent story seems to get the short shrift too, even if it’s one of the more interesting parts of the movie with Driver being great in the role. I think Midnight Special would have been a much better movie if it would have just concentrated on either the religious aspect OR the government one. Otherwise, it’s one too many things going on in a movie that at times feels like there needs to be more explanation while at the same time seemed to drag in places.
Borrowing elements from a lot of other movies like Aliens; little kids in danger, soldiers inside an APC running away from the creatures, a commanding officer who watches events unfold from the APC, Predator; soldiers being hunted by an invisible foe, Black Hawk Down; special forces soldiers in combat in a ruined urban environment and more, Spectral is a bit of a mishmash of concepts and styles. Which can be a good thing, lord knows that sometimes all I want out of a sci-fi movie is a mishmash of things from other movies. But I think where Spectral fails is that it never really sticks with any one concept long enough before dashing onto the next borrowed idea.
Released 37 years ago today, Star Trek: The Motion Picture follows the crew of the starship Enterprise who must intercept and stop a colossal something that’s destroying everything in its path and is on its way to the Earth. But what they find in this destructive “cloud” is something no one on the ship is prepared for.
Kind’a Signs meets Silence of the Lambs, in 10 Cloverfield Lane the character of Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is in a car accident and awakens in a bunker built by Howard (John Goodman) where she also finds Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.) who tells her that the end of the world has come and everyone outside of the bunker is dead. Michelle has a hard time buying this from Howard since he’s a grade-a weirdo, but when Michelle does get a glimpse of the outside world and all the horrors that entails she decides that maybe staying in the bunker with normal and nice Emmett and odd and crazy Howard might not be such a bad idea after all.
While most superhero movies are about good-guys trying to do good things, Suicide Squad is about the bad guys forced to do good things. Here, assassin Deadshot (Will Smith), girlfriend of Joker and just as crazy as Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) and others are all being held in prison indefinitely for their crimes. But they’re made an offer “they can’t refuse” by government agent Amanda Waller (Viola Davis). Go on a suicidal mission into a city possessed by the evil, mystical forces of the Enchantress (Cara Delevingne) and get big reductions on their sentences or refuse and they stay and rot in jail forever.
I think it’s this structure that mostly separates Suicide Squad from other superhero movies of late. It does fall into the genera tropes that most superhero movies do these days — if they fail their mission the world as we know it will end and they have to fight the main baddie who’s the strongest of them all and seemingly undefeatable at the end of the movie too. But all of this is pretty standard stuff for a comic book movie and since the characters are so well drawn and when they’re interacting with each other is so good I don’t think this hurts Suicide Squad too much.