Netflix has released the first images for its upcoming apocalyptic sci-fi thriller The Midnight Sky. George Clooney stars in and directs the project. One of the first images from the movie features a bearded and nearly unrecognizable Clooney staring out a window into the oblivion. The actor's character, Augustine, is trapped in the Arctic and believed to be one of the only survivors on Earth after an unspecified catastrophe.

While Augustine believes he is the only one left alive in The Midnight Sky, he stumbles upon a young girl named Iris, who is described as mysterious. "He [Augustine] wasn't really into protecting himself at all," George Clooney says. "The little girl is a problem for him, because now he actually has to take care of someone." If that wasn't enough, there is a NASA team returning from a mission to one of Jupiter's moons that proves to be hospitable for the human race.

George Clooney's Augustine is desperately trying to contact the NASA team in space, which includes Felicity Jones' Sully and Kyle Chandler's Mitchell. Part of the movie takes place on Earth, while the rest of it is all in space. "It's a tricky thing," George Clooney said of the movie, "because half of it's Gravity, and the other half of it's The Revenant. And they're not natural fits, so it was a constant balancing act." He went on to address the time that The Midnight Sky is coming out in. Clooney had this to say.

"[When we were shooting] there wasn't the pandemic, and we hadn't set the whole West Coast on fire. I mean, the picture we show of Earth doesn't look that much different than the satellite pictures of the West Coast right now. The sickness of hate and the elements that come from that, battles and wars-that has been percolating for quite some time. There's the sadness [in the film] of what man is capable of doing to man and how easily it can just be taken away. I wanted it [the movie] to be about redemption in a way. I wanted there to be some hopefulness in a fairly bleak story about the end of mankind."

The Midnight Sky marks George Clooney's first acting gig since 2016's Hail, Caesar! and Money Monster on the big screen. He would later appear in the 2019 TV miniseries Catch-22. When discussing what attracted to him to the role of Augustine, he noted that part of it was his age. "There was a stillness to the character that I really liked," he said. "You need to be of a certain age for it to actually hurt. When you're younger, we don't feel like we've had enough life experiences for things like this to actually hurt you in your chest." In the movie, Augustine is suffering from a terminal illness, so Clooney added some personal touches. He explains.

"I just took a shaver and shaved all my hair off, and I tried to do it kind of badly so that it looked patchy. And I've got some pretty funky scars on my head in general. Since he is clearly dying of something that he has to have a transfusion for, which is usually some form of cancer, it was important to me to add some elements so that I didn't look like I look normally."

When looking at the images from The Midnight Sky, it's almost hard to tell that George Clooney is in the movie. "I have had a lot of people, the first couple of shots in the movie, not realize it's me," Clooney says while laughing. "They're like, 'That's you?' My wife was very happy when I finished shooting this." The Midnight Sky is based on the novel Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton and is written by Revenant co-screenwriter Mark L. Smith. You can check out the first-look images above, thanks to the Vanity Fair Twitter account.