Moon

Rating: 8/10 (23 June 2011)

This film won the BAFTA for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer for debuting filmmaker Duncan Jones, son of David Bowie (he was formerly named Zowie), as far as I know this was one of those surprise hit movies, and I wanted to see it. Basically Sam Bell (Confessions of a Dangerous Mind's Sam Rockwell) is the astronaut working for Lunar Industries working a three year long contract as the lone employee on the lunar station whose job it is to harvest and rocket supplies of Helium-3, the current clean and abundant fuel, back to Earth. There is no live communication available between him and Earth, so he relies on recorded message from his Lunar Industries colleagues and family, and the only company he has is interactions with the intelligent functioning computer GERTY (Kevin Spacey) attending his day to day needs. Three years has been extremely slowly, but Sam is relieved it will all end in two weeks, but as this time approaches he find himself hallucinating, all he wants is to return to Earth and be back with his wife Tess (Dominique McElligott) and little daughter Eve (Rosie Shaw). One day he does his usual routine work in the space truck on the surface on the moon, but something distracts him as he has an accident, and the next thing he knows he awakens from unconsciousness in the infirmary, and GERTY tells him he needs much rest. Sam decides to go against the wishes of his faithful computer and investigate something outside, and what he comes across is a crashed harvester vehicle, and he carries the body out and inside the station, he is shocked to see it is himself. This second Sam is insisting he is the real one as he remembers the crash happening, they are both confirmed by GERTY as being the same person, but they realise they are both clones, and that they are part of a standard routine of cloning where every three years a new one takes over operations. The Sam recovered from the crash site is slowly coughing blood, this is the effects of the three year existence, so he is dying, and the new Sam is the one who has to decide what to do him soon. Hacking the camera system the dying version of Sam manages to call home, and he is shocked to see an older Eve (Kaya Scodelario), hearing that her mother is dead, and that she appears to already have a father there. The new Sam clone places the dying version in a supposed hibernation capsule sent for rescuing, but it in fact an incinerator, and the pod is shot into space like it is meant to. The new Sam is told by GERTY that memory needs to be wiped in order for things to go back to the way they were, with another new clone on the space station, so he does do this, and the end before leaving to return to Earth, Sam has a space truck crash into the antenna blocking communication to Earth so that it can be freely accessed. Also starring Benedict Wong as Thompson, The IT Crowd's Matt Berry as Overmeyers and Malcolm Stewart as Technician. Rockwell gives a fantastic performance as the astronaut, and his identical clone(s) who discover the Lunar Industries plots to keep things running smoothly, and Spacey as the much nicer version of HAL 9000 is good, the story is marvellous with some good twists and delicately investigated themes of loneliness and humanity, and of course the visuals of the space station and lunar surface are wonderful, a terrific science-fiction drama. It was nominated the BAFTA for Outstanding British Film. Very good!