The Midnight Sky: What Happened To The Earth

In Netflix’s The Midnight Sky, terminally ill scientist Augustine Lofthouse (George Clooney) lives alone at a research facility in the Arctic three weeks after the Earth is devastated by an unknown apocalyptic disaster referred to only as “the event,” which is never explained by the end of the film. As Augustine attempts to warn a group of astronauts on a return mission from Jupiter of Earth’s dangerous conditions by traveling to the Lake Hazen weather station with Iris (Caoilinn Springall), a young girl who was accidentally left behind, to contact their spaceship, The Midnight Sky provides subtle clues that insinuate the cause of the catastrophe that left Earth uninhabitable.

While The Midnight Sky may be set during an apocalypse in the year 2049, the event that is responsible for the end of human civilization acts as a footnote, since the plot is centered more on Augustine’s life as he survives day to day and revisits past regrets. Through a series of flashbacks, it’s revealed that Augustine typically put work ahead of personal relationships, which included never meeting his daughter. This appears to be Augustine’s greatest regret, however, given the twist ending of The Midnight Sky: that Iris isn’t a young girl who was left behind, but rather a memory of Augustine’s daughter, the astronaut Iris Sullivan (Felicity Jones) onboard Aether whom he only saw once from a distance when she was a child. Since the novel the film is based on, Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton, also doesn’t explain the catastrophe, viewers are left to piece together what happened to Earth from the evidence scattered throughout the film. 

Certain indicators suggest that the event referred to in The Midnight Sky was likely a nuclear apocalypse. When Augustine is monitoring the computers at the Barbeau Observatory, maps of the Northern hemisphere show that various locations on Earth (indicated in red) were impacted by the event, which contaminated the surrounding air with radiation that is slowly spreading across the world and to Augustine’s location. When Dr. Sullivan contacts Augustine after she’s given a visual from outer space of Earth’s conditions that display mushroom clouds forming on the Earth’s surface, Augustine states, “I’m afraid we didn’t do a very good job of looking after the place while you were away.” According to Augustine’s statement and the visual of Earth, it’s implied that humanity itself is to blame for Earth’s destruction due to a possible man-made nuclear disaster that contaminated the air with rising levels of radiation, which explains why Augustine depicts the only survivable locations as temporary underground areas.

Within the novel Good Morning, Midnight, it’s implied in chapter one that the apocalypse might’ve been the result of a nuclear war when it states, “… the last news from civilization, over a year ago, had been of war.” Apart from a ship’s log in which Commander Adewole (David Oyelowo) states that Sullivan is breaking protocol attempting to make contact with China, India, and Russia, there is no suggestion, however, of an escalated conflict that led to nuclear war within the film. With this in mind, The Midnight Sky aligns itself more with a fan theory about the original novel: that the event was caused by an EMP. In The Midnight Sky, Augustine attempts to describe the event to Sullivan stating, “I know it was a mistake. It started with—,” before his transmission breaks up. Since Augustine depicts the event as a “mistake,” it makes sense that an EMP likely caused the world’s nuclear weapons to malfunction as opposed to nuclear war.

The event that led to the apocalypse in The Midnight Sky is possibly left unanswered in order to intentionally draw parallels between Earth and Augustine. Just as the cause of Earth’s devastation is unexplained, Augustine’s illness is left ambiguous. Just as humanity can’t fix the damage they did to Earth, Augustine can’t account for not being a father to his daughter. Unlike the remnants of humanity, however, who retreat underground, Augustine tries to make up for his past mistakes by contacting his daughter on Aether and providing her with an alternate plan for her to safely return to Jupiter, imbuing a bit of hope into Augustine’s tragic end.