Midnight Special (2016) [Blu-ray]
Adventure | Drama | Sci-Fi | Thriller

In the sci-fi thriller Midnight Special, writer/director Jeff Nichols proves again that he is one of the most compelling storytellers of our time, as a father (Michael Shannon), goes on the run to protect his young son, Alton (Jaeden Lieberher), and uncover the truth behind the boy's special powers.

What starts as a race from religious extremists and local law enment quickly escalates to a nationwide manhunt involving the highest levels of the Federal Government. Ultimately his father risks everything to protect Alton and help fulfill a destiny that could change the world forever, in this genre-defying film as supernatural as it is intimately human.

Storyline: Alton Meyer is a boy unlike any other in the world with bizarrely powerful abilities and strange weaknesses. In the middle of the night, his father, Roy, spirits him away from the isolated cult that practically worships him and is determined to regain him at all costs. At the same time, Alton's abilities have been noticed by the US government as well and they are equally insistent on getting to the bottom of this mystery with Paul Sevier of the National Security Agency leading the Federal pursuit with his own questions. These rival hunts force father and son into a desperate run towards a looming date with destiny that could change everything. Written by Kenneth Chisholm (kchishol@rogers.com)

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Michael Reuben, June 20, 2016

"He Is Not Like Us" proclaimed the trailer for Midnight Special, the fourth feature from writer/director Jeff Nichols and the filmmaker's first effort backed by a major studio. The trailer then offered glimpses of the eerie phenomena emanating from the boy at the film's center, including bright lights and powerful energy fields. While the kid in Midnight Special may not be like us, he is like other youngsters in movies whose outer innocence masks dangerous potential and who have been a genre staple from Village of the Damned to The X-Files. Midnight Special continues Nichols' efforts to put his personal stamp on familiar tropes following the critical success of Take Shelter and Mud (both independent features prominently noted in the trailer). Unfortunately, Midnight Special fails to live up to its promise. Though it might make a terrific pilot for a TV series, as a standalone film it disappoints.

Warning: Midnight Special drops the viewer into the midst of ongoing events, allowing the history of the characters and their relationships to emerge gradually. From that perspective, the following discussion may be deemed to contain minor spoilers.

The "he" who isn't like us in Midnight Special is eight-year-old Alton Tomlin (Jaeden Lieberher), a delicate and sweet-natured kid who wears blue swimming goggles as a precaution against the blinding light that randomly radiates from his eyes. Alton has been raised on a remote Texas farm inhabited by the followers of a preacher named Calvin Meyer (Sam Shepard), who deems Alton a messenger from Heaven and has adopted him as his own son. The trauma of having Alton taken away from her provoked his mother, Sarah (Kirsten Dunst), to desert the farm's cult. Now, two years later, Alton's father, Roy (Michael Shannon), has followed his wife, fleeing Calvin's group with his son in tow. An amber alert has been declared, and local law enforcement has mobilized.

But the police aren't the only ones pursuing Alton and his father. Federal authorities monitoring Calvin's farm have detected that the child's delphic pronouncements, which Calvin and his followers treat as holy writ, contain classified information intercepted from government satellite transmissions. A consultant for the NSA, Paul Sevier (Adam Driver), has been tasked with assessing the threat posed by Alton's abilities, and he seems to be the only person among the boy's pursuers who is genuinely intrigued by Alton's unique gifts. The Blu-ray extras confirm that Sevier is intended as an amalgam of the scientist and his translator played by François Truffaut and Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but in Driver's performance, he seems more like the spooky government renegade with a poster in his office proclaiming "I Want to Believe".

Midnight Special follows the pursuit of Alton and his father, who are assisted by Roy's boyhood friend, Lucas (Joel Edgerton in an underwritten role), as they alternately run and hide with no clear plan except to reunite Alton with his mother. Throughout the chase, Alton continues to manifest strange abilities. (A sequence of what might be called aerial bombardment is particularly impressive.) As it gradually becomes clear that Alton is being summoned to a rendezvous much like the alien landing at Devil's Tower or E.T.'s spaceship rescue, Nichols appears to be building to a conclusion that will introduce humanity to a new race of beings or an alternate dimension (or both), but Midnight Special fails to deliver the promised encounter, offering only futuristic tableaux instead of a transcendent sense of wonder and awe.

Part of the problem may be budgetary. At an $18 million production cost, Midnight Special is the most expensive of Nichols' films to date, but that sum isn't nearly enough for the kind of operatic effects sequence that Steven Speilberg orchestrated to cap Close Encounters. The bigger problem, though, is a failure of imagination. As Nichols admits in the Blu-ray extras, he did not attempt to conceive in full the "other" world to which Alton is mysteriously linked. Having made the choice not to explore that alternate reality in depth, he should have left it to the viewer's imagination, offering no more than a glimpse of the ineffable, as he did at the end of Take Shelter. Like The X-Files, which Nichols' film resembles more than it does a Spielberg-style fantasy epic, Midnight Special works best as a thriller generating suspense from the inexplicable and unknown. But as often happened in The X-Files, when the moment arrives to reveal the truth that's out there, Nichols can't satisfy the expectations he's built up so effectively.

Midnight Special has a fine cast and an interesting premise, and it's unfortunate that Nichols couldn't find a more effective conclusion for a story that, by its very nature, must remain open-ended. There are good things in the film, but it's unsatisfying. The Blu-ray will not disappoint, although the extras are slim. Rent if curious.

[CSW] -3.0- Midnight Special is a thoughtful science fiction film that doesn't spend much time explaining itself or spoon-feeding the audience. It's up to the viewers to pay close attention and piece the story together. I found it extremely refreshing because it's not like the explosion-filled sci-fi flicks of the past 15 years or so. It feels more like the family blockbusters of the 1980s (Starman, Close Encounters, E.T. , Cocoon, etc.). It is the mystery as you try to piece together the story that holds your interest. The slow-drip plot mechanics lead us to assume that all our questions will eventually be answered, but what makes Midnight Special so frustrating is that most of them aren't even asked. Although it does have an unforgettable conclusion, that conclusion is not satisfying in the least as it actually opens brand new questions without answering any of the previous ones. Science fiction is supposed to end in an idea and not an action but its true merit is in how well that idea is presented and explained. The solid acting is what brought this up to a 3 star rating.
[V4.0-A4.0] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box.
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