Midnight Special (2016)

PG-13.  In my mind, this was one of those R-rated movies with all kinds of creepy gross stuff.  Nope.  Nothing all that offensive.  The parental advisory on the plane said that this movie had language.  Even that, I don't remember.  There's a pretty intense gunfight that was grounded enough to be a bit upsetting.  But, honestly, not much happens in this movie outside of blood.  People do die, but it never stays in the moment long enough to make it too upsetting.  I suppose a child in danger is a trope that could raise a few flags.  Still, PG-13.

DIRECTOR:  Jeff Nichols

Normally, when I take a Trans-Atlantic flight, I have a whole bunch of movies to write about.  Nope.  Not this time.  I knew that I didn't want to write a blog ten days after having seen a movie, let alone multiple movies.  I read books.  I know that this is a blog called "Literally Anything: Movies", but books are great too.  So I watched Midnight Special...yesterday.  It's fresh.  And it's the only movie I watched.  (I was thinking of watching other things, but I was being a dad and even Midnight Special had to get paused a million times. 

Midnight Special, since its release in 2016, has always been my ignored plane film.  I keep finding it on airplanes and I've always put it off.  It's something that has itched the back of my brain forever, mainly because the aesthetics of the trailer seemed rad.  And for a minute, I thought that Midnight Special was going to be one of my favorite discoveries.  After the first twenty minutes, I turned around to my wife and said, "This movie is going to be rad."  From that opening, I thought that this was going to be one of the best films I had seen in a while.  It set up this fun mystery involving a cult and numbers.  The vibe of the movie felt very A24 without the gore element.  It felt sleepy and dramatic and I was on board.  But then the movie started answering questions.  Sometimes, I want a movie to give me every answer imaginable.  I think Midnight Special did better with a sense of mystery and should have held it a little closer to the vest.  Once we found out what was going on, it was just Starman or E.T..

I didn't mean to make a Ghostbusters 2 reference, but those movies basically have the same plot.  A group of people, against the wishes of the U.S. government, have to move an extraterrestrial / supernatural creature to a special spot in the country so that they can return home. Cool.  These movies have legs because they're a sci-fi road movie.  With Midnight Special, it became about the family that came together to save Alton, the Starman of this movie.  I'm just going to get the spoiler out of the way because I don't really have the time to dance around it.  Alton's big reveal is that he comes from an alternate plane of reality.  Even though he was the child of these two human people, he's from somewhere special and technologically advanced.  (I might unpack the trans or euthanasia allegories in a second.) Sometimes, we care about the alien.  Sometimes we care about the group.  Honestly, Alton isn't a very fun part to play.  Like E.T., there's the fear that he's dying the entire time.  But we care more about the relationship between Roy, Lucas, and Sarah.  If you are really invested, you also care about Dr. Sevier.  Midnight Special does something a little laudable.  It makes you deal with trauma.

With Starman or E.T., it's very much an adventure.  With Starman, Karen Allen is on this romantic journey with this otherworldly person.  She, too, is recovering from trauma, but her adventure with Starman is bringing her out of her trauma.  E.T. is about coming out of your shell as well.  The kid finds a friend and ultimately the adventure makes him a better person.  Midnight Special is about emotional survival. There's a lifetime of trauma that these characters are reeling from, especially the last two years where Alton was being raised by a cult leader.  We don't see much of that.  Instead, Roy and Sarah find fleeting moments of happiness where they actually have what they wished for.  For the course of these three days, they have a semblance of a family.  Sure, that family is in constant chaos, on the run from the law and worried about the death of their son.  But they have moments of tenderness.  But these moments aren't making them better.  If anything, these moments are so imbued with pain that they seem to be dying parallel deaths to Alton.  

Yes, Roy becomes a better person by the end.  But this isn't some grand moment for him.  This is about putting his son to rest.  We understand that Roy loves Sarah, but we never get to see it because they are in triage mode.  And, unlike the other stories, we know that there are going to be real world consequences to the events of the story.  Like, it's weird that Elliot (that's his name!) isn't locked up in a facility for the rest of his natural life.  Roy knows he's going to jail. Lucas walks around the entire movie knowing that he's given his life up for his friend's kid.  There's also the odd consequence of defining oneself in the shadow of knowing that this was either going to end in death or prison. Lucas has to turn on Roy because he's trying to hold onto a morality beyond the concept of consequences.  Roy is single-minded.  He has to get Alton to this location or else Alton will be vaguely destroyed.  (It sounds like I'm dumping on this concept.  This is one of my favorite vaguaries that stays through the film.  I like that Alton's alternatives are undefined, but terrible.) But Lucas won't kill people just for this kid.  He has the understanding that his life is forfeit to this kid, but others didn't sign up for it.  It's pretty interesting.  So it's this kind of stuff that separates Midnight Special from other movies.

But I don't know if it's enough. Like, I really like the character dynamics.  But this specific road movie keeps having the same format.  Also, as cool as Alton's world is, it's not really all that original.  There's this cult out there that has so much promise and we don't really have that paid off like I want.  Also, if we are making a kinda-sorta action movie, the government seems really disorganized in this movie.  Part of that comes from the fact that it is absurd that these three po-dunk former cultists (okay, two cultists and a state trooper) could take down the U.S. government without a real plan.  My big red flag is Dr. Sevier's contribution to the plan.  We get that Adam Driver's performance is something that is worth gleaming onto. The good-natured scientist in the midst of this whole government conspiracy is fun.  But it's weird that he gets carte blanche, enough to walk that kid out of a facility.  Also, I get that Sevier cuffs himself and pretends like he was overpowered, but that doesn't answer a lot of questions.

I said that I would touch on a potential trans or euthanasia allegory and I suppose I kind of have to.  A lot of this feels like me adding something to the narrative, but I also feel like 2016 is a different time to tell this story than the '80s.  Alton is dying.  Roy seems to really be pushing Alton harder than Lucas is.  Lucas is in this world that Alton's survival as he is might be the most important thing.  It's not like Lucas is wrong.  Roy comes across as a huge jerk.  He's holding onto this motive that we don't understand.  As the kid bleeds out of every oriface, we wonder why Roy is not more concerned.  But the movie also stresses that there is no happy ending for Roy or Sarah.  Alton was going to be gone at the end of this journey.  A hospital isn't going to change that.  It seems like Roy's agenda is to have Alton die with dignity.  But then Alton begs to go out into the sun.  Roy seems like that's shortening his life, but he allows Alton to make that decision.  Sure enough, Alton perks up after a sunrise.  (I don't really understand what exactly happened the other times that he was out in the sun.  How much sun does he need?  Is there always a surge of energy with each contact with the sun?  Also, nice Superman comparison in the movie...) But Alton is ultimately asking his parents to let him be the person that he wants to be.  The parents are trying to be protective, but Alton knows what his body needs.  I'm holding your hand a little bit with this one, but it seems like that allegory might be intentional.

I was so jazzed for the first twenty minutes of the movie, but the rest of the movie just fine.  There are a lot of stupid parts and the government seems really bad at what they do.  But it was a pretty movie with a lot of good acting.  I can see why people don't really chat about this movie after it got a little bit of hype.