The Midnight Sky (2020)
You can watch this free on Netflix. I wouldn't feel the need to bother. Apparently, it cost about $100 million to make, and that was kind of a waste.
It's adapted from a book called Good Morning, Midnight by one Lily Brooks-Dalton. It's a science fiction movie about a scientist on an Earth that is dying, who dedicates himself to warning an incoming spaceship of the catastrophe, and that they should turn back to the new habitable moon that they have recently investigated. Both the scientist and the ship have to go through several perils with disrupted communications to get their essential message across. The scientist, Augustus Lofthouse, has to get across the arctic to a better communications array, and the ship has to contend with space debris (mm) crashing into their ship. Key member of the ship is a pregnant woman called Sully.
This review is going to be spoilertastic, and I'd like to explain some massive plot holes that switched me right off it.
I remember reading an essay by the science fiction author Iain Banks, who said that writing science fiction is not for amateurs. On the assumption that the movie is reasonably faithful to the book, Lily Brooks-Dalton is an amateur and it shows in painful ways. We could start with the notion that a new moon of Jupiter has been found, which through some truly astonishing reasoning apparently we haven't discovered yet, which apparenty has an Earth-compatible atmosphere and be warm enough to live on. No, I don't buy that either: if we have any moons of Jupiter left to discover, they'll be tiny, barren, rocks and extremely cold. I'm not sure what these bands of space rocks are bombarding the ship, either. They're apparently quite close to Earth, and, er... what are they? Next, the disaster that is wiping out the Earth. It's something involving radiation, but what's gone wrong (other than an experiment) is completely unexplained in a really annoying way. How the movie handles it is awful. It's switching between Augustus and the crew on the spaceship where the signal is bad, and it flicks from a shot where Augustus is about to explain what's happened to a shot on the ship, where the explanation is nothing but static and fractured bits of word. At some point, our scientist hero "finds" a little girl who he has to take with him in his expedition through the Arctic. It is painfully obvious that she is a figment of his imagination within about 10 seconds, render this formal disclosure at the end very underwhelming. The big heartwarming message at the end reveals that "Sully" is Augustus's long abandoned daughter. Except that was also so painfully obvious it's another failed reveal..
So then, at the end, one of the crew having died on the way, the captain of the ship goes back to the irradiated Earth on a lander to see if he can find his family (already sick and probably dead), with one of the other crew members despondent about the death of the other crew member, leaving Sully and the other crew member (her baby's father) to go back to the moon and raise their child and give humanity another shot. Now, I think, maybe, there's a hint from the film that other ships went out there and so there are other humans on this moon. If not, the human race is boned anyway, because the lack of genetic diversity with just one set of parents will probably doom the human race through inbreeding anyway. I would also strongly dispute the decision of the other crew to go back to Earth. It's billed as the "be with your family" approach, but if it's dangerous to get back to the Jupiter moon (as the trip from the moon to Earth suggests), then they are vastly increasing the chance Sully and partner will be killed, so I cannot respect that as the right thing to do. Plus, you know, the tiny fragment of the human race left could really do with that extra genetic material.
So, this movie is quite dull, fails to work on numerous emotional levels, and the science fiction setting detracts very badly from it because as a science fiction film it's a minor disaster.
