Augustine is a sick scientist left alone at an Arctic base after a deadly event ruins most of Earth. He tries to warn a spaceship crew not to come home. The crew is flying back from a moon near Jupiter and does not know Earth is dying. The film feels cold, sad, and quiet, with big space and ice scenes and a soft hope at the end.
The story is mainly about regret, loneliness, and a father who wants to help the people he failed. A normal viewer mostly sees a sad sci-fi drama, not a loud identity lecture. The spaceship crew is mixed by race, with a black captain and a black woman engineer in key jobs. The global disaster is never fully explained on screen, but the film and its director treat it as something humans caused, which some people read as a climate warning. There is almost no anti-woke fight over this title.
Community feedback
Was our 32% Woke rating accurate?
Loading review details…
Breakdown
These are the editorial factors and ratings behind our score for The Midnight Sky.
Woke representation / casting
The Aether crew is clearly mixed: black commander Adewole, black engineer Maya, Latino Sanchez, plus white leads. That fits modern “diverse space team” casting and is easy to notice. Roles are competent but not sold as a girl-power or race-quota lecture. Near-future NASA-style setting keeps it from feeling like pure forced rewrite.
30%
Woke political dialogue
Characters talk about survival, home, family, and the ruined Earth more than slogans. The disaster is never spelled out as a party speech. Any “humans did this” message is soft and mostly in mood and interviews, not long activist monologues.
18%
Identity-driven story themes
Core story is regret, fatherhood, isolation, and hope for a new world. The man-made global disaster can read as a mild climate warning. Race, gender, and sexuality are not the engine of the plot. An interracial couple and a baby stand for hope, not a lesson on identity.
22%
Western institutional / cultural critique
The film suggests people wrecked their own planet and society, which is a soft “we are the problem” idea. It does not push hard modern attacks on whiteness, patriarchy, Christianity, or classic Western family as the main point. Absent-father regret even fits older moral storytelling.
15%
Woke character or canon changes
Not relevant. Changes from the book are mostly pregnancy for a real-life cast reason, new action beats, and renamed crew. No clear race or gender swap of a famous real person or legacy hero for DEI goals.
0%
Anti-woke backlash and complaints
Almost no organized right-leaning “this is woke propaganda” wave. A few thin user comments mix climate politics and “woke” gripes. Main public fight was quality and pacing, not identity agenda.
5%
Creator track record context
Clooney’s liberal politics and climate framing, plus Brooks-Dalton’s climate-fiction background, give mild progressive context. Screenwriter and most producers are low on identity activism. Overall signal is moderate liberal prestige, not hard DEI doctrine.
28%
Production
Movie · 2017
Thirty years after the events of the first film, a new blade runner, LAPD Officer K, unearths a long-buried secret that has the potential to plunge what's left of society into…
Movie · 2019
When the Sun begins to expand in such a way that it will inevitably engulf and destroy the Earth in a hundred years, united mankind finds a way to avoid extinction by propelling…
Movie · 2014
The adventures of a group of explorers who make use of a newly discovered wormhole to surpass the limitations on human space travel and conquer the vast distances involved in an…
Movie · 2017
A young man raised by scientists on Mars returns to Earth to find his father.
Movie · 2017
In the near future, Major is the first of her kind: a human saved from a terrible crash, then cyber-enhanced to be a perfect soldier devoted to stopping the world's most dangerous…
Movie · 2016
A spacecraft traveling to a distant colony planet and transporting thousands of people has a malfunction in its sleep chambers.
Movie · 2019
In a series of escalating encounters, former security guard David Dunn uses his supernatural abilities to track Kevin Wendell Crumb, a disturbed man who has twenty-four…
Movie · 2016
Taking place after alien crafts land around the world, an expert linguist is recruited by the military to determine whether they come in peace or are a threat.
