‘The Midnight Sky’ review: On the ice, after the apocalypse, with George Clooney getting terrific direction from ... George Clooney

A man alone, with a quarantine beard, sits and eats a plateful of whatever he probably ate the day before.

He shuffles back to his computer screens, monitoring red-zone hot spots. He wonders if his old life is gone for good. He’s longing for human contact. He wonders where it all went wrong. And he’s fatally ill, as we learn in the opening minutes of “The Midnight Sky,” director and star George Clooney’s grandly executed Netflix film streaming Dec. 23.

Just what I need. Some peppy escapism, you may be thinking. But this postapocalyptic drama, taking place three weeks after an unspecified “event” has decimated the planet, soon shifts gears and eases into a warmer, reassuring realm of science fiction, in between regular bouts of suspenseful calamity.

Without venturing onto a tundra of spoilers, “The Midnight Sky” recalls the human connection concerns of Denis Villeneuve’s “Arrival,” or Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar,” as well as the various versions of the survival thriller “I Am Legend.” Further back, there was Stanley Kramer’s “On the Beach,” plainly one of Clooney’s influences. They’re very different (and unlike “On the Beach,” this one I’d like to see a second time), but in story terms of the number of major characters, “The Midnight Sky” is “On the Beach” on ice, and in space. And it’s really good, from the musical score by Alexandre Desplat to the spacewalk sequences we’ve seen before, but not quite like this.

Half its story (the time is 2049) unfolds among a small group of astronauts and explorers returning home from one of Jupiter’s potentially habitable moons. The valiant group of women and men just trying to get home in one piece, while dealing with flying space debris apparently borrowed from “Gravity.” That film co-starred Clooney, and gave him a leg up in making his own effects-heavy vision of the near future.

Clooney plays the terminally ill Augustine, renowned astronomer and the last one (by choice) to remain at an Arctic Circle research facility. He dreams of his younger self (played by Ethan Peck, voiced by Clooney — a much cheaper solution to flashbacks than found in “The Irishman”), his workaholic tendencies, a squandered love affair.

In the Arctic research station one day, Augustine’s unblinking, wide-eyed gaze is startled by a young girl, thought to have been evacuated along with the others, hiding out in the kitchen. She does not speak, but she watches everything. These improbable companions become make a dangerous, wind-blasted trek to a neighboring research facility by snowmobile, braving stray wolves and melting ice caps. Played by Caoilinn Springall — much of the movie was filmed in Iceland — Iris in her parka and snow goggles resembles Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s "The Little Prince.”

In between cliffhangers, Augustine issues distress calls, picked up eventually by astronauts returning from Jupiter’s previously undiscovered moon. On board the spacecraft, Sully (Felicity Jones), who is pregnant, has the company of some extremely well-cast comrades: They’re played by David Oyelowo, Damien Bachir, Tiffany Boone and Kyle Chandler. Sully can’t fathom why communications with NASA have gone silent. “The Midnight Sky” toggles between these two sets of characters, on earth and out there, gradually winding them around the same narrative pole.

The script is from Mark L. Smith, adapting the 2016 debut novel “Good Morning, Midnight” by Lily Brooks-Dalton. As director, Clooney’s most significant achievement is getting everyone in the same, tonally tricky story, and in overseeing a complex array of digital effects big enough to immerse us, but purposeful enough not to crowd out the humans.

Cinematographer Martin Ruhe, who shot “Control” and worked on Clooney’s Hulu “Catch-22” adaptation, isolates Augustine in his forbidding environment, frequently deploying the classiest possible update to the iPhone portrait setting, blurring everything around the focal point. It’s a canny tactic, paving the way for convincing depictions of outdoor snow blindness. In space, the images are crisp and inviting, even when the space explorers enter virtual-reality memories of their families far away.

I’ll admit it: When the orphaned waif showed up, looking like a kid auditioning for Young Cosette in “Les Miserables,” I worried that “The Midnight Sky” would get lost in a schmaltz blizzard. But both as director and star, Clooney finesses this character, and her place in the story. Reluctant father figure and hardy daughter figure become conduits for a tale about what we leave behind, and of hanging onto memories of life in the Before Times. Metaphorically, we can all relate.

I wish I could see “The Midnight Sky” on a screen bigger than the one I’ve got in the living room, but like “Arrival,” or the controversial, divisive James Gray/Brad Pitt project “Ad Astra,” this one feels both expansive and intimate. The dual narrative tracks keep it interesting. Whether you buy the central idea here, as the two tracks become one, isn’t the deal-breaker it might’ve been in other hands. This is easily Clooney’s finest hour behind the camera since “Good Night, and Good Luck” 15 years ago. And it’s one of his finest performances.

'THE MIDNIGHT SKY'

3.5 stars (out of 4)

Rating: PG-13 (for some bloody images and brief strong language)

Running time: 2 hours, 2 minutes

Playing: In some theaters where open; available Dec. 23 on Netflix.