Midnight Special tells its story in a very small window of timeline and left out a lot of unanswered questions that happened before the start of the movie.
But for what happened during that window, it's really good storytelling and a different take on a kid with superpowers (or the likes). Best description would be a kid who manifested mutant powers like X-Men but with no Professor X in its world to stand up for him.
Director Jeff Nichols has worked with Michael Shannon for all his feature films and this one puts Shannon in the forefront. Nichols also collaborated once again with another child actor, as he did with Mud; and if you look at Jaeden Lieberher's work so far, he could easily be the next kid to make it big in Hollywood. (Tye Sheridan from Mud is now Cyclops in X-Men: Apocalypse.)
But like in Mud, Nichols still make certain decisions that did not agree with me. That first scene when Shannon and Joel Edgerton attempted to smuggle Lieberher's character into the car, there were a few other options that could have made that scene more believable but maybe it's just me.
Nevertheless, Nichols pacing here is better than Mud (can you tell that I've just watched Mud?) and his story development kept even the worst kinds of audience sitting beside me in the cinema pay attention. Also, Nichols has a knack of drawing great performances from his child actors, and brought out one of Shannon's and Kirsten Dunst's best performances.
And the best parts about the movie was the tone, that heavy, sombre feel; breaking only when the background song took over towards the end and drove home the emotions.
No comments:
Post a Comment