This movie was a mess.

I agree that if you look at this film as a sci-fi, it dissapoints, in that it fails to provide sufficient explanation of the sci-fi elements that make such films so facinating.

But the story isn't "about" sci-fi. It's not "about" the boy's powers, the other world or how he came to be in this world. That's merely a backdrop for the real story, which is about the different ways the characters react to something they don't fully understand: fear, wonder, acceptance, exploitation, etc. We can sympathize with the reactions of the charaters, because we don't fully understanding what's going on either.

I analogize it to a wartime romance movie. The story is about the romance--not the war. We wouldn't fault the film for failing to explain the causes of the war, detail the battle plans, identify the generals, etc.

So much potential...



personally, I thought the film would have been GREAT IF NOT for the 5-6 HUGE plot holes and issues in the second half... potential, again, was immense.

How did they mess this up down the stretch?

THe production values... the sound, the look, the action sequences,... just great, thrilling... but those damn holes... like how did the NSA guy(Driver) get the kid out from underneath everyone's feet... and within seconds no less... just one of many glaring plausability issues down the stretch... other than that, this could have been a 2016 top 10 mainstay... jmo

I also agree, that after the movie I felt like wtf, did they do to us.

It didn't start bad, but yeah later on you could feel that it only took 40 days to shoot that movie.

What others have discussed already, the escape: All left the room, but I doubt they all went home, but they just manage to leave the whole building. And then, after the analyst delivers the boy, it felt like, oh lets throw in some stupid joke, hey give me your handcuffs, you wouldn't punch me in the face? I mean really? What would he want to cover up? He helped him leave the building and drove 4 hours to drop him off and now he is sitting their in handcuffs?

And yeah the end was really painfull, when you have to look into actors faces staring amazed at something that isnt really there. Felt like an eternity... Was a Star Trek one feeling, when they fly 5 mins around the plastic model of the enterprise with open mouth, when they showed the other world.

And yeah after the movie, the big question, why did he have to be there on that day, why was it so important and if it was not, why did I just watch the whole chase?


Oh and someone wrote, ahhh the majority liked that movie, so it has to be good. Are you saying, that the majority of Mankind is intelligent? And yeah Star Wars Episode 7 had also a good rating, which kinda negates your statement.

The movie had potential, but it felt very bad executed with probably a lot of time pressure.

A lot of meaningless random series of events + a bunch of visual effects = midnight special. I really wonder if Hollywood finished there Tales and Stories. Just like CELL movie; there are no ideas at all. And I am really surprised about winnings and nominees!! These are truly meaningless. What is the point of view of such movies?? Where is the
theme, or subject??

Much as I dislike the meaningless phrase "it is what it is", that's really all you can say about this rather uninteresting film.

The plot is simple but pointless since there are so many loose ends, unanswered questions, everything that this thread's OP, Chris, relates. My summations of the plot are at the end of this message. I invite comment/correction as may be available.

What others in the thread have said is also valid, hinting that this is a specific genre of film in which a wispy "hint" of a plot is given that intentionally invokes the viewers' curiosity and then INTENTIONALLY does not satisfy it.

The "point" of this film (if films need a point) seems to be up to you. It's: "Choose your own beginning and end, because we're just supplying a skeletal middle for you.".

The writers of this screenplay are either avant-garde concept writers who want to address sketchy issues of belonging, trust, insecurity, and perhaps parenthood, or they are flunkies who had a cool sci-fi dream that was fragmented and disjointed, had no point to it, and just thought it would be fun to make into a movie at the cost of millions of dollars and millions of people's free time to watch.

I have certainly had more profound, meaningful sci-fi dreams than this, but they would cost too much to make, take too long for the average viewer to sit through without intermissions, yet require a view in one sitting to appreciate.

The plot as I see it is:

A child is born to human parents but is somehow either not human or a mutant (among many) who have special powers such as telepathy, some form of built-in omni-technical remote control over any and all electronics, the ability to perceive electronic signals across the electromagnetic spectrum, and (most notably) the ability to spontaneously form a rather large "gateway" to an alternate/parallel reality (actually it seems to co-exist within a domed region or various sizes along side our reality temporarily) populated with disembodied energy beings and plenty of rather boring, non-traditional architectural designs and the ability to close the aperture behind him and disappear for however long he likes and reappear in the last moment of the film in the reflection of his father's eyeball, which if you were too disinterested by the end to notice happened in the last 3 seconds of the film. The child is worshiped by a cult, supposedly because they are impressed with his glowing eyes and think he's god-like, taken from the cult by his father and a long-time friend to be taken to his mother and ostensibly to a place where "the world ends". Meanwhile, they are pursued by several federal agencies because he knows the locations of and has the ability to spontaneously destroy top-secret satellites. The child seems completely indifferent to the cult's and his father's use of needless, bloody violence (and there's a bit of it) to control the child. The child's powers seem merely to be used to "return" him to the parallel reality. He doesn't have(or doesn't use) any magical healing powers for the many people near him who are injured or killed. He doesn't prevent anything bad from happening at all, really, but seems only interested in GETTING OUT OF THIS WORLD. In the end, he leaves, and his parents are just fine with that, with one behind bars and the other on the run.

I guess a shorter, simpler plot summary would be:

A child, pursued by government agencies for his having unauthorized access to classified information and equipment, is enticed to join a community of strange energy beings in a parallel reality which has supposedly existed along side ours on the same planet with its inhabitants observing our world for many years. His parents seem not to care that this group trans-world aliens or mutants, whom they have never met or communicated with, are basically kidnapping their son, and leaving them behind as either convicted criminals in prison or forever on the run from the law because of the hideous violent choices they made in helping him change residences from a cult compound to a world of glowing, floating spirit people who for some reason require large, unconventional solid structures for their society.

Yup. The script was clearly written in a rush and with no outside input. It needed to be fleshed out a lot more, and the movie needed a slightly bigger budget.

Nichols is a good writer-director, but this was definitely a rushed job. Oh well, next one will be better. Maybe he needs to wait a little before doing Sci Fis.

This move is utter sh!t in every-single-thing, dumb plot, fully predictable (I mean you knew 20 mins-in that this is one of these movies that will end with the kiddo reaching the destination... and that would be it), the CGI worse than a cheap tv series, OST? what ost? One track on the loop.
If it wasnt for these good actors no one would have even bothered consider watching this sh!t.

This movie is one of these dumb fking movies that the script writer and the director do not know what the fk they are doing and where the fk they are going with it... and they leave everything open to any interpretation so the dumb pseudo-cultural idiots jump on and pull out of their bottoms every dumb fking theory possible and then claim that "you didnt got it".

I agree with the OP.

Well, I would still give it a 6/10, because they did create a very immersive atmosphere, and the mysteries did keep me wanting for more until the end.

Unfortunately just did not tie in anything together.

People here are debating this a lot, and the truth is that yes, some movies can be perfectly successful even with a big unexplained supernatural mystery or mysteries in general. Especially if the big driving force and point of the movie is about something else other than the mysteries.

But that didn't work for Midnight Special. It set itself up with all the mysteries from beginning to end, it relied on them entirely to tell it's story, and at the end left nothing for the viewer to put together. I didn't get anything out of the ending, there was no fulfillment. It just felt like a very interesting, but also very unfinished movie that really could have been special but wasn't.







Arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice: www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhBWDzkqEPY