A budget film trip to the moon

Rating: 8/10 (2 November 2009)

Duncan Jones has delivered a real little sci-fi gem here. With a tiny budget he manages to get us to the moon, where a solitary Sam Rockwell is almost at the end of a three-year contract supervising an automated Helium mining operation. Sam has a HAL-like computer looking after him, but after an accident outside in a moon rover, HAL starts acting – well – protective. Sam is then confronted with - well – himself. Sam 2 is not a vision, unlike the apparitions in "Solaris" which are the product of an alien intelligence, and the two Sams have to come to an accommodation before a "rescue" mission arrives.
The lunar mining base is hi-tech but shabby, in the way than mining camps tend to be. Gerty the computer which is attached but movable is particularly battered. Voiced in sepulchral tones by Kevin Spacey, Gerty has some of the menace of HAL from "2001", but in the end follows Asimov's first law of Robotics – a robot shall not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Without giving the plot away, it is evident early on that Sam 2 is a clone. He is also undoubtedly human – a clone is after all an identical twin born at a different time. Sam 2, though, is obviously programmed to replace Sam 1. How then should Sam 1 act? This situation makes for an interesting resolution. In a beautifully judged performance Sam Rockwell does a great job of his everyman in space role. We feel his loneliness and his longings. We also feel his fear, when it becomes clear that something is wrong, without any aliens or other monsters being present (the villains turn out to be home-grown). Duncan Jones makes good use of references to other great sci-fi movies but has added his own take on the "man alone in the universe" situation. It's possible to pick holes in the story (would a mining operation crucial to the Earth's energy needs have only one human supervisor?) but the movie is so well executed you hardly notice. Maybe it's all moondust, but it's a clever piece of work.
The science behind the story is sound; Helium-3 the rare helium isotope is both useful in nuclear fusion and more common on the surface of the moon than on Earth - we may well find ourselves using it as a source of energy one day.