Midnight Special isn’t particularly special. It’s not even set at midnight. And it sounds like something your dad watches when the rest of the family goes to bed. I would have called it ‘Jesus Christ, This Film Finishes at Midnight’, because that’s what I said when I saw my screening’s showing time. Luckily, it had a relatively effective way of keeping me awake: blinding blue light shooting from the eyes of a frequently florescent eight-year-old boy.
Alton Meyer (Jaeden Lieberher) is not like us, as the film’s tagline ominously states. In addition to lighting up like a hooker at a UV party, he can also decrypt government transmissions, bring satellites crashing down to Earth and almost make the alien-eyed Michael Shannon look like a believable good guy.
His father, Roy (Shannon), with the help of tagalong Lucas (Joel Edgerton), is trying to drive him to a set of mysterious coordinates for an unspecified reason. You know it must be leading to something interesting, though, because they’re being chased by the FBI, the NSA and a bunch of nutters who live on a ranch and think the kid is Christ reborn. It has the potential to be a modern Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but it’s more Thelma & Louise meet E.T.
And Steven Spielberg’s influence is apparent; the title is actually a reference to a folk song of the same name that featured in his big-screen rendition of The Twilight Zone. Dan Aykroyd and Albert Brooks sang along to it while driving in the dark. That scene was memorable, though, because at the end Aykroyd turned into a witch zombie and strangled Brooks to death. In Midnight Special, director Jeff Nichols mistakes that kind of suspense and spookiness for being dull and drawing everything out until you reach a wet fart of a finale.
‘But it’s gritty and realistic,’ I hear other critics bleat. That’s true, but that doesn’t really work when the characters hardly say more than two words to each other, don’t have backstories and show no real sign of development. The only thing I noticed develop was a stream of drool on my mate’s chin as he drifted into a deep coma. It’s only character-driven in the sense that there are characters and they do a lot of driving.
It is pleasing, however, to see it avoid genre clichés. And at no point did I wince at any Knowing-type dialogue, littered with forceful suggestions about aliens and religion having some sort of ingenious link. But then it didn’t get any sort of reaction out of me. I think I would have been grateful if one of Alton’s blue beams of light had triggered a sudden epileptic fit and for the remainder of the film I sat there a twitching and frothing mess. That would have added some drama.
Like most things that think they’re really clever, Midnight Special is more than the sci-fi film it sells itself as. By the time they get Alton to his birth mother (Kirsten Dunst), it becomes clear that this is a story about parenthood and the fear of losing a child. Shannon and Dunst play it like their oversized lava lamp of a son is moving out to go to college, rather than embarking on a world-changing adventure. They’re quite quick to accept that he’s different and zero ‘but he’s my baby’ tantrums are thrown.
The best performance comes from Kylo Ren, Adam Driver as a nerdy NSA agent whose open-mind attitude towards Alton is reminiscent of Fox Mulder’s from the X-Files. His reaction to the whole debacle is also the most believable: if a kid can control anything electric and make stuff explode, you do what he tells you.
This all should have been leading to a wondrous, original denouement, but coughs up Tomorrowland-like bewilderment. I kept trying to convince myself something more was coming, that it’d been immensely subtle for the most part because something life- affirming was about to happen. And then, just like this review, it ended.