10 Most Over-Rated Movies Of 2016

Indie favourite Jeff Nichols’ fourth feature film Midnight Special tells the tale of a young lad, Alton (Jaeden Lieberher), with a mysterious gift who is ‘kidnapped’ by his own father Roy (Michael Shannon) from a cult convinced he is the key to some sort of Rapture-like apocalypse. As the father-son duo flee across the country accompanied by Roy’s friend Lucas (Joel Edgerton), the cult’s henchman are in hot pursuit alongside Adam Driver’s government agent. Nichols has said of his filmmaking approach that he thinks ‘plot is overrated’, but Midnight Special is purposefully vague to the point of being off-putting.

At Nichols’ own admission Midnight Special is a homage to Spielberg sci-fi fantasies of yore like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, but whereas those films had firm plots and character exposition Nichols’ film boasts hardly any. His avoidance of narrative and deliberate ambiguity had the indie crowd raving of course, but really it just comes off as pretentious.