Moon

2009
Directed By Duncan Jones


SYNOPSIS

In the near future, Earth's  energy woes are solved by mining on the moon. Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is the sole worker at the Lunar Company's base and is weeks away from going home. His only company is the computer GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey.) When investigating some malfunctioning mining equipment, Sam crashes. When he comes to, he has no memory of the incident. Once healthy, he defies orders and heads back to the mining equipment, only to find himself barely alive in the lunar rover. He brings the other back to base and they find out their clones... and their company has many dark secrets. They must find a way to get to Earth

MY THOUGHTS

This is a perfect example of what Sci-Fi should be... but rarely is.

The best science fiction always transfers modern day social issues and talks about them in abstract terms in a futuristic setting. Moon tackles cloning, self identity, and the corporate/capitalist mentality. All of these factor into the story without being too heavy handed and weigh down the narrative.

The best sci-fi values story over special effects. The special effects in Moon are low tech. The old school style of using actual models over CGI actually makes them look real. Even a bad eye can easily pick out computer graphics because they've yet to completely perfect them to fool the eye. Here, the moon appears as real as looking at high-quality images from the Apollo missions.

Moon has more than a few nods to 2001: A Space Odyssey. GERTY is clearly HAL - the next generation. But Moon has much more humanity than the austere 2001. Moon is also vaguely similar to the 1972 and 2002 versions of Solaris.

Kevin Spacey's voice and other actors appear on the periphery. Sam Rockwell is the star. He's proved himself to be a very versatile actor over the years... yet this is his career highlight. He plays two versions of Sam. Both are clearly the same guy with the same memories, hopes and aspirations (built in to the clones) but are subtly different. One is subtly more quick to anger, the other is subtly more artistic and introspective. You never question who is who. He does a marvelous job.

Director Duncan Jones hits a home run with his first film. The son of David Bowie shows a very bright future as a film-maker