Jeff Nichols’s hugely hyped new sci-fi mystery Midnight Special has been compared to Spielberg’s Close Encounters, but it is worryingly much closer to M Night Shyamalan’s futurist folly The Happening, with all that film’s incorrigible daftness and intergalactic anticlimax. I enjoyed Nichols’s previous movie, the boyhood tale Mud, but remain sceptical about his much-praised breakthrough Take Shelter, a colossally portentous quasi-visionary picture. Like this one, it starred Michael Shannon, whose performance now comes close to self-parody. Maybe Nichols joins Christopher Nolan as a film-maker who has fallen under the Shyamalan spell of silliness. Midnight Special is about a very special eight-year-old kid called Alton (Jaeden Lieberher), who has been abducted by two men, Roy (Shannon) and Lucas (Joel Edgerton). These caring kidnappers keep him in motel rooms whose windows are blacked out with cardboard; Alton can’t go out in daylight and routinely wears swim goggles and earphones.
On their trail are goons despatched by a cult leader (Sam Shepard), from whose adoptive care Alton has been taken and who believes him to be the key to an forthcoming Rapture-style apocalypse, and the FBI and NSA, whose bespectacled, unthreateningly nerdy agent Paul Sevier (Adam Driver) is the only authority figure anyone can trust. As Alton, Lieberher speaks in the teeny-tiny little savant voice patented by Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense. Spielberg would have got a feistier and more humorous performance out of both kids and grownups, and would not have allowed that “cult” subplot to be so lamely underwritten and underimagined. Midnight Special starts strongly, and finishes nowhere very interesting.
