Category Archives: Action/Adventure

An acquaintance of mine is a realtor. I have known him for many years. He is a very serious and industrious person. Although he began his career in his twenties strictly selling properties, he moved into securing mortgages for his customers, and now even does commercial property management. Periodically, I would suggest that he date, get married, and begin to start a family.

 I reminded him that when he gets older all these possibilities become more difficult. He is now in his late forties, still single, and totally immersed in his real estate business. He spoke to me recently about his existential loneliness, but I could not offer him any panacea. He had made his choices and now was bearing the consequences of his earlier life decisions. This is similar to what happens in The Midnight Sky, the story of Augustine Lofthouse, an ambitious scientist whose lifework is to find a habitable planet where humanity can grow. His work defines him as a man of intellectual power but he has little empathy for others.

Augustine is a loner. After giving a lecture on the potential for life on K-23, one of Jupiter’s moons, he meets Jean Sullivan and begins a romantic relationship, the consequences of which is the birth of a daughter. Augustine, however, is obsessed with his own scientific research and does not commit to marriage with Jean, refusing even to acknowledge his fatherhood.

In 2049, thirty years after the birth of his daughter, the earth experiences a catastrophic event in which most inhabitants are wiped out. Augustine, now laboring in a remote laboratory in the Arctic, is sick and knows that his days are numbered. However, he is imbued with a sense of mission and wants to contact any functioning spacecraft and inform its crew of what has happened on earth. His goal: tell them not to return to an inhospitable planet, but rather journey to find another planet on which to survive and create a new world.

Augustine discovers Aether, a spacecraft that is still functioning. It is now returning to earth from Jupiter where its crew has explored K-23 for possible future colonization. Augustine attempts to contact them. They are unaware of what has transpired on earth, but Augustine’s antenna is too weak to make contact with their ship. He travels, despite freezing temperatures and harsh winds, to another base in the Arctic wasteland where there is a stronger antenna and eventually makes contact with them.

Unforeseen calamities occur, resulting in damage to Aether’s radar and communication system, but the crew is able to fix it. Once the repairs are made, the crew of Aether is confronted with a decision: to return to the earth or not. Sully, one of the astronauts, speaks to Augustine informing him that members of the crew with family on earth want to return there in spite of the danger. In their heart to heart conversation, secrets of the past are revealed that give us an understanding of why he is driven to save the crew in the twilight of his own life.

Film critic Joseph Morgenstern frames the film’s message in an idiosyncratic way: “In the here and now, the film makes a dramatic case for planetary stewardship, and a stirring one for the connections we crave. In the course of those deep-space repairs the astronauts start to sing Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline.  ‘Hands, touching hands, reaching out, touching me, touching you.’ It sounds silly in the telling, but not in the singing. Whenever they can, reaching out and touching is what people do.”

Augustine lives in his own private world for the bulk of his life, disconnected to other human beings, not reaching out and touching other people. Dina Mensch, a Jewish educator, writes about the importance of living a life of balance between satisfying one’s own intellectual and occupational interests and allowing our inner selves, our souls, to grow and connect with others: “The human being was created with a soul, which is a portion, or reflection, so to speak, of Godliness. This soul is what differentiates us from animals. If God created me, I must have a unique purpose in this world! Therefore, the point of my existence, and my self-worth, revolve around my moral choices, not my professional success.”

Mensch encourages us not to wait for crisis in our lives to make a self-evaluation. Augustine Lofthouse in The Midnight Sky waits too long to make a self-evaluation. When he realizes what he has missed in life, it is too late to make a mid-course correction.

As I write this review, the world is in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. Many emails and much of the Internet are filled with important messages to take away from this world crisis. One of the most meaningful is an essay entitled “Coronavirus: Is It Good?” written by Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo.

Here is an excerpt: “to our utmost dread, we have fallen into the hands of one tiny virus that forces us to our knees, causing us not only to be aware that we’ve lost our certainty, but to realize that we never had it to begin with!

And this wake-up call is actually an enormous blessing, enabling us to become genuine realists. This tiny virus forces us to admit that our self-assured sense of health is a farce, and that our certainty of being able to breathe, walk, speak and think, come what may, is all wishful thinking.”

Rabbi Cardozo goes on to remind us that the great sages of old composed blessings for almost every human experience, including eating food, seeing the beauties of God’s creation, and something as mundane as visiting the bathroom.

For the rabbis in the Talmud, nothing was taken for granted. They walked around in a state of “radical amazement” says Cardozo, appreciating all of God’s gifts. He continues: “All of this is in fact very liberating. It creates new space in our minds and souls and offers us opportunities that we forgot existed.

The mask has fallen, and reality has confronted us as never before.

What a marvelous opportunity to make a new start! We suddenly become aware that life is a gift that is unearned and it may be a little dangerous to feel too much at home in this world. We are offered the chance to make a distinction between the vital and the futile; the trivial and the important; what needs to inspire us (and we should cling to) and what to drop.”

I share Cardozo’s comments with you because they relate to the central theme of Ad Astra, a science fiction cerebral thriller that deals with the change of attitude one might adopt when confronted with mortality.

It is sometime in the near future, and the world is being hit by strange power surges, the origin of which is unknown. As the surges increase in frequency and intensity, the U.S. Space Command contacts Major Roy McBride, son of famed astronaut H. Clifford McBride, to inform him that the source of the surges is the “Lima Project,” an initiative begun 26 years earlier to search for intelligent life beyond earth, a mission led by his father.

Signals from the mission ceased 16 years before when the project was orbiting Neptune, and there is lingering suspicion that Clifford McBride is still alive. Roy’s task is to fly to Mars and from there to Neptune to establish contact with his father.

Once on Mars, he meets Helen Lantos, the director of the space station, who shares with Roy the classified videotapes that show the crew of the Lima Project mutinying against his father, Clifford McBride. The crew wants to return to earth and McBride wants to continue with the mission, regardless of the human cost. Roy now is faced with deciding whether to save civilization or his father if he cannot do both. The isolation of space provides the background for his soul-searching, which takes a toll on his normally dispassionate decision-making process.

When we first meet Roy at the outset of his journey, he articulates his mental state: “I am focused only on the essential, to the exclusion of all else. I will make only pragmatic decisions. I will not allow myself to be distracted. I will not allow my mind to linger on that which is unimportant. I will not rely on anyone or anything. I will not be vulnerable to mistakes.” That certainty ebbs away as Roy meditates on the human cost of his father’s devotion to science.

His isolation and the reality of his father’s all-consuming obsession with the pursuit of scientific inquiry compel Roy to reconsider how he is living his own life. He reflects: “So many times in my life I screwed up: I’ve talked when I should’ve listened, I’ve been harsh when I should’ve been tender.” His relationship with his wife suffered from his emotional detachment. He finally recognizes his aloneness and looks forward to the time when his solitude will end and he can return home.

At the end of his journey, he meditates on his current mental state and is ready to embrace human connection: “I’m steady, calm. I slept well, no bad dreams. I am active and engaged. I’m aware of my surroundings and those in my immediate sphere. I’m attentive. I am focused on the essentials, to the exclusion of all else. I’m unsure of the future but I’m not concerned. I will rely on those closest to me, and I will share their burdens, as they share mine. I will live and I will love.”

Our Sages tell us not to separate from the community. They understood that a life lived in isolation is not a life. To appreciate what we have means to live with others, in a community that shares its loves and losses. To paraphrase the Psalmist, when we experience the agonies and ecstasies of human experience together with others, we will rejoice in song together with the family of man.

Purchase this movie from Amazon.com.