TRANSMISSION IMPOSSIBLE

GEORGE CLOONEY PLAYS A DOOMED SURVIVOR OF A GLOBAL APOCALYPSE IN NEW NETFLIX MOVIE THE MIDNIGHT SKY . SCREENWRITER MARK L SMITH AND CLOONEY HIMSELF TELL US HOW THEY STEERED IT TO THE SCREEN

- IAN BERRIMAN

GET ME SOMEONE WHO CAN WRITE ABOUT A guy tramping through the snow!” a cigar-chomping producer bellows into his phone. You could be forgiven for wondering if that’s how Mark L Smith got the gig on Netflix movie The Midnight Sky, given that it’s similarly snow-shrouded to his Oscar winning frontiersman tale The Revenant. But there’s much more to the story than that. For starters, half of it unfolds in the even chillier environs of space.

Based on Lily Brooks-Dalton’s 2017 novel Good Morning, Midnight, it’s set in 2049, and centres on Augustine Lofthouse (George Clooney, who also directs), an astronomer based at a remote Arctic station. When a humanity-ending global catastrophe (something to do with the atmosphere) strikes, his colleagues fly off to be with their families at the end.

But Lofthouse – who’s dying from cancer – stays behind, using the little time left to him to try and contact the Aether: a space vessel returning from a recently discovered moon of Jupiter, whose crew includes Felicity Jones’s Sully. This involves a perilous journey to another station – accompanied by Iris (Caoilinn Springall), a close-mouthed young girl who’s somehow been left behind…

It was the writer’s manager who brought the book to him. He was immediately smitten. “I just fell in love with the characters and the world,” Smith tells SFX. “Lily BrooksDalton is such a wonderful writer. I love stories that strip away a lot of the technology, like a Revenant situation, where it’s man against nature, and man against himself.