Rockwell is great but story misses

Rating: 7/10 (20 July 2009)

What a great opportunity to utilize an under-appreciated actor like Sam Rockwell to create a thought provoking look at the subject of cloning. Unfortunately, a great individual performance goes by the boards in a less than original si fi treatment of this controversial subject. Space has often been used as the playground for artists hoping "suspend the disbelief" of their audiences allowing them to consider the nature of a film's focus. Neither the use of Kubrick's menacing computer "HAL" nor the images akin to hallucinations did justice to either the aforementioned Kubrick or the Russian film Solaris. Both of these films used space to examine human nature. Moon never reaches these depths. Gerty, the not so menacing computer in this film, is sort of devious and kind of helpful. Rockwell's discovery of a clone of himself aboard the ship is a little unsettling, but within moments the two are playing ping pong. The film fails to capitalize on the psychological turmoil caused by isolation not to mention the ethical and moral delimmas cloning poses. With one character and a setting confined almost exclusively to space station, the director just couldn't bring himself to peel back the skin and bore into the human psyche. Very odd and disappointing conclusion to the film attempting to "wrap things up" in the last five minutes or so.