Directed by: Jeff Nichols
Starring: Michael Shannon, Joel Edgerton, Kirsten Dunst, Jaeden Lieberher, Sam Shepard, Adam Driver, Sean Bridgers
I reread a recent four-star review of Midnight Special on www.rogerebert.com after watching the film myself. I wanted to see if maybe I missed something that caused the website critic to praise the film while I walked out of feeling complete indifference and asking, "that's it?" His opinion greatly differs from mine. He was moved by what he saw as an emotionally powerful film. This is how the film affected him and movies work differently for different people. Midnight Special promises a great payoff after a nearly interminable buildup and, like Nichols' 2011 Take Shelter (also starring Shannon), I was underwhelmed by the outcome. The results were not worth the wait or my stripped patience. So, rogerebert.com and I will forever be on opposite sides of the fence on this one.
The buildup doesn't keep the tension wound tightly. The story doesn't seem to propel itself forward at a rate that it should, so I was never convinced that something truly remarkable was at stake or at hand. The film reminded me in every way of Take Shelter, including the promise of something awesome that was not delivered. In that film, Shannon played a construction worker haunted by visions of an impending apocalypse which causes him to build a fallout shelter to protect his family. The apocalypse itself reminded me of a tornado that didn't make the final cut for Twister.
Then, the real ending occurs and the movie cuts to the credits before we can bask in its implications. By then, it didn't much matter. The movie was a lost cause.
As Midnight Special opens (what exactly does that title mean?), there is an amber alert for a missing child taken from a compound not unlike that constructed by David Koresh. The boy, named Alton, (Lieberher) is not an ordinary child, but one with special powers such as the ability to emit lasers from his eyes and crashing a satellite using sheer will. The compound is run by a cultist religious leader (Shepard), who believes Alton will shield them from an upcoming judgment day and base their biblical sermons out of seemingly random numbers Alton revealed to them.
He sends two men to retrieve Alton from his father Roy (Shannon) and his accomplice Lucas (Edgerton), both of whom discover that the numbers Alton refers to are coordinates to a rendezvous point of some kind. Roy must get Alton to this meeting point in three days while eluding the cultists and the federal government, who raid the compound in hopes of finding out why the group recites bible passages with the coordinate numbers that also reveal places of special interest to the government. NSA Agent Paul Sevier (Driver) is brought in to help find Alton.
The whole business with the coordinates is hard to follow. You would think a boy who emits laser beams from his eyes and performs telekinetic powers would be able to simply tell his father that they need to go to Bumfuck, Louisiana to meet up with someone or something. Paul is able to deduce the rendezvous point by staring at a morass of longitudes and latitudes before his big eureka moment in which he circles two numbers and determines this to be the meeting place. How did Paul do that? Is he from the same gene pool as Alton? And does a boy who can do what Alton does really need to be protected by guys with guns?
Speaking of gene pools. Alton was conceived by two normal adults who don't appear to have any special powers. How did Alton wind up with these powers? Did he possess a very recessive gene? So many questions. We are so confused that soon Paul is brought in to meet with Alton and thankfully recaps everything for us. This doesn't help my enjoyment of the film, but at least I have some idea of what's at stake.
There are very talented actors here who are at the mercy of a story that requires entirely too much patience to explore and understand. Roy and his mother Sara (Dunst) understand that Alton has a purpose they don't fully understand, but have faith that it's the right purpose even if they are not included in it. Alton explains he is caught between this world and an alien world "just above Earth". When this world is revealed, it reminded me of Tomorrowland with an abundance of ugly weeds growing all over it. I wondered if they paid the landscaping bill.
The actors doggedly work with seemingly complete faith in Nichols' vision. They take this stuff so seriously that no humor is allowed to sneak in and give us relief from it. Shannon is the perfect actor for this material because he is so, so, so serious. I don't think I have ever seen him smile in his entire career. That doesn't make him a bad actor. On the contrary, he is a very good one. But I know he has a romantic comedy in him somewhere. He needs the break.
Midnight Special asks us to make emotional investments in a story that doesn't hold up its end of the bargain. It is completely convinced of its Depth, but once it's all said and done we realize there wasn't much to it after all. Midnight Special is part E.T., Starman, Tomorrowland, and The Sixth Sense. The bad parts. Nichols wrote and directed the movie with so much gravitas that I almost feel bad to report that his efforts failed. You hate to see a guy expend so much passion and energy into a project that doesn't ultimately work.
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