Shot for the Moon. Missed.

Rating: 6/10 (17 July 2009)

The movie Independence Day was released on the 4th of July (1996). Tim Burton's upcoming post-apocalyptic animation feature 9 will open on 9–9–09. So you'd think, wouldn't you, that a movie called Moon would have come out on July 20? But no, evidently Sony Pictures Classics figured that, after 40 years, missing by only 3 days wouldn't be that big a deal.
Of course, as we know from actual flights to the Moon, the 1st 400,000 km is the longest part, but not the hardest; if you're off by a tiny fraction of a percent on arrival, you crash. And that attitude, regrettably, also shows up in the movie itself. They start with an absolutely dynamite idea — the sort of SF story that I always beg and plead to have made into a movie — and fritter away all that potential with gaping logic holes during the execution.
Sam Rockwell stars as Sam Bell, who is (we think) the only live person represented on screen, since he's the lone (and lonely) tech on site at a mining operation on the far side of the Moon. It's vital that he be there, since Earth has nearly exhausted its supply of fossil fuels but continues to maintain its materialistic lifestyle thru profligate use of fusion power — fueled by the Helium-3 found in usable quantities only on the Moon (as we learn from the film's opening sequence, a "commercial" touting Lunar Industries Ltd., the megacorp that runs the helium mine).
Recent coverage of the Apollo 11 mission reminds us that the video camera that captured the stunning live pictures of Neil Armstrong's historic "1 small step" was itself left behind, as was all the other stuff the mission designers could reasonably unload. That's because basic physics and economics dictate that it's horrendously expensive to boost mass up out of Earth's gravity well, so you do it as seldom as possible, and pack as lightly as you can.
This is exactly the thinking of Lunar Industries, which has signed Sam to a 3-year contract. As the movie opens, he's looking forward to going home to his beautiful, loving wife and adorable baby dotter in only 2 weeks, when he reaches his "sell by" date. However, as it turns out, that's not just an awkward play on words, since Lunar had something else in mind. It costs money to ship mass back to Earth, too, y'know.
Sam starts seeing other people, people who can't possibly be there. Normally a rock-steady performer (psychologically screened for the job, we readily assume), he's increasingly distractable. His health starts deteriorating, similar to the way the equipment is starting to wear out (most distressingly, the lost communication signal from Earth). He worries that he's losing it.
And here ends the plot description, because there are several plot twists (not just one) the rest of the way, and I don't want to spoil them. They are the elements that, as I said above, made for a dynamite story idea.
Normally I'm thrilled when movie-makers give the audience credit for some intelligence and imagination, and that's the case here. The automated helium harvesters that Sam superintends are known prosaically as 1–4, and we're left to infer from casual conversation that Sam calls them Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The fonts and abbreviations used in the command center are identical to what Stanley Kubrick used on Discovery in 2001, and director Duncan Jones just puts them out there as Easter eggs for the cognoscenti. There's even some sly meta-humor in naming the movie's production company  Lunar Industries!
But here's the thing. If you expect the audience to be sophisticated enuf to pick up on those subtleties, how will they not notice such glaring incongruities as equipping Sam with a large supply of whittlin' wood (way heavier than MP3s)? Or a ping-pong table (for a 1-person camp!)? Or the idiot use of multiple large antennas, evidently for the sole purpose of jamming communications — something that the base's robot intelligence GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey) could easily have accomplished for a tiny fraction of the effort? And it's not giving away too much to say that, if you see the film, you too will wonder "Why so many of them?".
It's one thing to find yourself thinking, an hour after having left the theater, "That didn't make any sense.", "No, they wouldn't have done it like that.", or "Man, no way all that stuff could have happened in that short a time.". It's quite a different thing when those thots keep running thru your head when you're actually trying to watch the movie.
Too bad. Coulda been great. Shot for the Moon. Missed.