This post-apocalyptic tale follows Augustine, a lonely scientist in the Arctic, as he races to stop Sully and her fellow astronauts from returning home to a mysterious global catastrophe.
A scientist is working alone at a remote Arctic research station when he learns of a mysterious global disaster. At the same time, he meets a strange girl in the Arctic, with whom he must stop the return to Earth of the crew of the spaceship "Aether".—Bazza the Beast
Scientist Augustine Lofthouse (George Clooney) has devoted his life work to finding habitable planets where humanity can expand. He has just discovered K-23 a previously undiscovered, habitable moon of Jupiter, which has the right conditions to sustain human life. Lofthouse postulates that the moon's environment is not governed by the Sun, but by its own internal Geo-thermal activity. It is heated from the inside out and has all the right conditions for life.
He meets Jean Sullivan (Sophie Rundle) after giving a presentation at a gala and the two form a romantic relationship. After a pregnancy scare, Jean leaves him because of his obsession with work and inability to bond with other human beings. Before leaving, Jean tells Lofthouse that she is not pregnant and that he has nothing to worry about. Jean says that while Lofthouse is focusing on giving hope to life on Earth, his own life is slipping away from him.Several years later, Lofthouse encounters her again and she tells him that they have a daughter, whom he chooses not to meet.
Thirty years later, in Feb 2049, an unspecified disaster has wiped out most of the Earth's population and left the surface contaminated with ionizing radiation. The event took place 3 weeks ago.Lofthouse refuses to join the evacuation of his Arctic base, knowing he does not have long to live due to an unidentified serious illness requiring Hemodialysis.During evacuation, one woman was worried that her daughter Ana was nowhere to be found, and she feared that she was left behind. Another colleague convinced her that she saw Ana on a different flight out of the base.
Lofthouse observes the spread of the Ionizing radiation in the Earth's atmosphere and knows that it is only a matter of time before it reaches the Arctic base station.Lofthouse searches the base's computer system for active crewed space missions to warn about the situation on Earth, and finds only one: the interplanetary craft Aether, returning from an exploration of Jupiter's habitable moon K-23, which Lofthouse discovered.
In the meantime, the crew of Aether are oblivious to events on Earth and believe they have lost contact due to faulty communications systems. The crew has 3 male and 2 females, including Sully, Maya, Sanchez, Adewole and Tom Mitchell. They have not been in contact with mission control for 3 weeks.His antenna will be in range for the Aether in 12 hours.
Along with his deteriorating physical health, he finds he is experiencing mental blackouts. After a kitchen fire, he finds a young girl hiding who does not speak. He tries to contact the other evacuees to get someone to pick her up, but they are all out of range or are already dead. The girl communicates by drawing and tells him her name is Iris (Caoilinn Springall).Iris obeys Lofthouse's commands, but insists to sleep in his room, despite Lofthouse assigning her a separate cabin. Even after 12 hours, Lofthouse is not able to make contact with the Aether. Lofthouse finds his antenna is too weak to contact them, even after calculating them to be in range.
He grows fond of her and takes her with him on a snowmobile to another base farther north, which has a larger, more powerful antenna. Lofthouse packs his dialysis equipment. He also reckons that the other base is surrounded by low hills, which might protect the base from the effects of the ionizing radiation which have already reached the current base station. Lofthouse finds several dead birds outside the base station and knows that it is only a matter of time before the radiation penetrates the base station itself.
Just ahead of the base station, the air is free of Ionizing radiation, as it hasn't reached that far yet. The journey itself takes several days and on most nights Lofthouse sets up a tent for shelter.On the way, Lofthouse encounters a broken private plane and a survivor inside. The survivor pleads with Lofthouse to kill him, which he does.
They encounter an abandoned trailer and decide to rest, only for the trailer to go through the ice at night. Lofthouse and Iris barely escape and Lofthouse loses the ice scooter and the dialysis equipment.Lofthouse only had enough time to rescue himself and Iris. The loss of the dialysis machine & the snow scooter condemns him to die soon.Lofthouse and Iris have no choice but to walk for the rest of the way to the weather station. Lofthouse digs holes in the ice to protect himself and Iris from severe snowstorms that they encounter along the way. Eventually, the weather clears and in the shining sun, Lofthouse and Iris reach the weather station.
Meanwhile on-board the Aether, the ship goes off course for a few seconds and the crew manages to shut off the main engine and rebuild a course back to earth, but that still puts the ship on course for passages that are not cleared for navigation.
Arriving at the base, Lofthouse manages to make contact with Aether, but the crew is interrupted by an asteroid field that damages the ship's radar and communication systems.
To repair the damage, pregnant mission specialist Sully (Felicity Jones) and her partner, Commander Adewole (David Oyelowo), conduct a spacewalk with their flight engineer Maya (Tiffany Boone). They repair the communications and radar but are caught in the middle of a second asteroid strike that fatally injures Maya.Sully reaches out to Lofthouse, who tells her not to return to Earth, but go back to K-23 and start a new life there.
Aether's pilot, Tom Mitchell (Kyle Chandler), refuses, but upon discovering his wife's (Miriam Shor) final words and seeing the state of Earth's atmosphere, he understands that it is in the crew's best interests to go back to Jupiter's moon. Still, he decides to use one of the two re-entry vehicles to go back to Earth, hoping to find his family who may have been evacuated to temporary safety. Sanchez (Demian Bichir), who saw Maya as a second daughter, decides to accompany him and bury her body.
In her final communication, Sully tells Lofthouse that he was one of the reasons why she joined NASA. She thanks him, telling him her mother Jean knew him, as he had given her a moon rock, and that her full name is Iris Sullivan. Lofthouse says he already knew her name, making it clear that the young Iris he saw was a hallucination.
When asked how he ended up at the base from which he contacted Aether, he says he thought he might be able to help someone, hinting that the reason that he kept track of Aether's mission was not just because he discovered the moon to which it went, but also because he knew Sully was his daughter and that she was a part of that mission.
Before heading out into the cold unprotected to die, Lofthouse tells Sully he is proud to have finally met her and Sully describes K-23 to him. Sully and Adewole are left to return to K-23 using a course provided to them by Lofthouse to give humanity a second start.
