The New 'Midnight Special' Trailer Is Sleek, Dangerous, and Thrilling
A boy with powers and his family fleeing Adam Driver at his most manic? Yup.
The lonely highways, desolate cornfields, and bleak motels of Middle America aren’t a common setting for movies. But where there is space and solitude, things can hide — at least for a while. The first trailer for Midnight Special had us interested — a young boy with mysterious, chaotic, and destructive powers? Adam Driver as a bespectacled government agent hypnotically focused on studying him? Joel Edgerton, Kirsten Dunst, and Michael Shannon as the troubled kid’s family, seemingly willing to do anything to keep him safe? We’re all aboard.
Trailer two is here, and it promises more of the same Middle-American surrealism that director Jeff Nichols eats and breathes — he’s responsible for Mud, which helped kick off the McConaissance with Matthew McConaughey’s equal parts dark and sentimental performance as a drifter in the Louisiana swamps.
Nichols has directed Michael Shannon before too, in 2011s similarly sinister-farmland-thriller Take Shelter. He’s described Midnight Special as a sci-fi chase film, and it looks like it’ll have all the smashed cars and glowing-eye explosions you think that would entail. Adam Driver appears to play a government scientist attempting to research and use the abilities of a young boy with terrifying power, who’s on the run with his family (Shannon, Dunst, and Edgerton).
Check out the full trailer below.
