Midnight Special (2016)

A Masterpiece!

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

To anyone giving this movie anything less than a 7/10... you are uncultured in film and have not the eye of a true indie film lover. You are the same person that quotes legally blonde and spends half their time scrolling through Instagram during a movie.This movie, including the director, is unique in many ways including his choice of actors, scripts, score, and cinematography. It introduced new ideas, not recycled plots/theories from other films, and did it in such a magical way that can't be compared to any other film. And the end of the film reveals an amazing hidden truth about the universe that has all captured our imagination at least once in our life before, and that this movie does a fabulous job of making it real.

A young boy has special powers and the FBI want him.Close Encounters Of The Third Kind meets ET without all the wonderfully uplifting John Williams music playing over the thing. Midnight Special caught me by surprise, I hired the DVD from the library because the DVD cover stated that the film was science fiction. At first I was reluctant to hire it out as I suspected it was yet another wham-bam-slam CGI-dominated sci-fi flick filled with smart ass characters...which seems to be the way these movies are made these days.To my surprise I was wrong. A nice retro feel here. Slow pace. Great acting. No pretty boys. A reasonable musical score. A bit of a road movie going on. I liked it. But having said all this...I can't say it is one of the great films of the 21st century. However, it is the type of science fiction flick Hollywood needs to do more often these days as compared to the last two Star Wars films (The Last Jedi and Rogue One)....Midnight Special is a masterpiece.

At 111 minutes, this "Midnight Special" turns into an endless experience, watching something that you have seen many times before with variations and different casts, including Martin Stephens in "Village of the Damned", Jeff Bridges in "Starman", Haley Joel Osment in "A.I. – Artificial Intelligence", and a rubber puppet designed by Carlo Rambaldi. My admiration for Jeff Nichols' films grew every time he released a new title, from "Shotgun Stories" in 2007, to "Take Shelter" in 2011 and "Mud" in 2012. However, this time he has gone the way of the big scale special effects frenzy with unfortunate results: it is so silly and simplistic, so lacking in finesse and humor, that I could not believe that it was the work of the same director. Nichols had previously been so delicate and perceptive of human condition (including "Take Shelter", a movie about ESP), and dealt intelligently with the innocence of boyhood, and the benign, naive side of manhood. This time again there is something similar in the core of the story, but the father seems too dumb and the kid too foreign to any credibility. If Nichols did not intend this story as a metaphor of Jesus Christ's passion (my goodness!), leaving the Holy Spirit out of this plot, then it also leaves an open door: how did this human-like E.T. end up in this world, having too earthlings as parents? I do not know who cares for a sequel, but I do not. The best thing in the film is Joel Edgerton as Lucas.

This director gets some good ideas. Unfortunately they're never more than one per movie, & sometimes they're almost the same idea. Now if could figure out a way to let his imagination incubate & let his mesh organically, he might come up with something on the order of Tarkovsky's SF fantasies Solaris & Stalker. Off course Tarkovsky started with material from some pretty great writers. Still, I think the potential is there.There's no question that there's some good acting on the screen, especially from Dunst (always an outstanding performer) & Edgerton (why are Australians so superior to Yanks). Michael Shannon delivers his standard Righteous Krazy Guy which, given how often this director uses him is what was expected.Overall, though, this plays like something copped from a few pages out of Spielberg's waste basket.