Midnight Sun
I once had a conversation with someone about what a movie needed more: a good plot or good actors. Their answer was that a good plot was paramount, and by the very definition of paramount, far more important than good actors. I think about that conversation often, and the further I get from it, the more I’m confused about which answer is the right one.
To be honest, there probably isn’t one right answer. There are movies like “Forrest Gump” that doesn’t have the strongest plot, but Tom Hanks’ acting made it a hit. Whereas movies like (and I hate to say this) “The Matrix” are great stories that are brought down by below average acting. There’s a balancing act to be done, and some films get perfect scores while others fail miserably. Few are able to find the happy medium.
Unfortunately, “Midnight Sun” doesn’t find that medium and doesn’t offer a good plot or good acting. But the acting, especially from the main character, almost ruins a perfectly average, emotionally manipulative plot that somehow managed not to be the worst movie I’ve seen so far, this year.
“Midnight Sun” (a remake of a 2006 Japanese film of the same name) stars Bella Thorne as Katie, the main character who can only go outside at night, thanks to a rare and life-threatening disease called xeroderma pigmentsum. She spends most of her time inside with her dad, Jack (Rob Riggle) and her best friend, Morgan (Quinn Shepard), sleeping during the day and staying up all night.
When we meet her, she doesn’t have much of a life or many friends, but after graduating from homeschool, she goes out to the train station to sing and play her guitar. We learn from the beginning that her mother used to play the guitar to her, and now she’s supposedly in love with it. During her performance she runs into Charlie (Patrick Schwarzenegger), who she has been watching from her window her whole life. Obviously, he’s immediately smitten with her, and this interaction changes both of their lives for better and for worse.
There is no shortage of teen movies being made every year, and there is no shortage of my love for them. From “The Breakfast Club” to “Ready Player One”, teens are a huge market and watching them grow up and deal with real problems even in their fictional worlds can be an amazing thing to watch on screen. I’m assuming that’s why “Midnight Sun” was created, to show different teens in a different situation than the ones we’ve seen before. But even then, I’m not sure why “Midnight Sun” exists.
The film is identical to 2017’s “Everything, Everything,” in which Amandla Stenberg’s character isn’t allowed to ever go outside, with the only small change being that Katie can leave the house at night. But instead of leaving the theater surprised at how much I actually enjoyed it (see “Everything, Everything now), I left the theater with a list of things that needed improvement, but also wondering why I didn’t dislike it more.
As I mentioned above, there is a lot of bad acting in this movie. Bella Thorne doesn’t do well trying to sell Katie’s wide-eyed girl, kinda scared of the world personality, and it took me out of the movie at several points. Everyone else is serviceable. Rob Riggle, Quinn Shepard, and Katie’s Doctor (Suleka Mathew) are mostly good until Bella is the main focus of the scene. Katie is the most fully-formed character in the cast (though not the most engaging), but the movie almost feels smoother when she’s just in the background.
Patrick Schwarzenegger would have been a fine addition to this film had his character not been so boring. He’s a swimmer who doesn’t want to swim, a former partier that no longer wants to party, and a pretty popular kid that sometimes doesn’t look (and by his own admission; doesn’t feel) that popular. I don’t know if Patrick is a good actor or not. To date, he hasn’t had a lot of opportunities to test his skill, but I do know that the script didn’t really give him a chance to at least attempt to be interesting.
“Midnight Sun” is a pretty surface-level movie when you place it under a microscope. We don’t know these characters well enough to care about them fully. We learn one thing about pretty much everyone, and that’s it. Even Katie doesn’t get much in terms of character development. She plays music because her mom played, but does she want to pursue it professionally? We never find out. What else does she like? Your guess is as good as mine, and I spent 91 minutes actively trying to find out to no avail.
I’m trying to review movies for what they want to be more than what I want them to be. I think that “Midnight Sun” wants to be a smart, witty, heartwarming film about a girl destined for death, falling in love with the boy of her dreams. Unfortunately, most of that just doesn’t come across, and it makes for a movie that feels more like a collection of plot points than anything else. But manipulation is key and at the end, which I won’t spoil for you, my eyes did tear up against my will.
I love teen movies, and I will continue to see them, in theaters and otherwise, until I no longer can. At some points, I really wanted to give this 0 trash cans, but I’m a sucker for this kind of stuff, and the ending was sadder than I was expecting it to be. I don’t know if good acting or a good plot is more important, and I may never know. But somehow, this film still got emotion out of me, and the one other person blowing their nose in the theater without either, and that’s something. I guess.
I give it 1 out of 5 trash cans.
