Industrial Malfeasance On The Dark Side Of The MOON

Rating: 8/10 (12 May 2018)

If there is one thing that has become fairly pervasive in 21st century Hollywood filmmaking, it is the proliferation of films whose main attraction are compute-generated images (CGI). This can be seen in the enormous proliferation of comic book spectacles such as THE AVENGERS, THE AMAZING SPIDER MAN, and IRON MAN, as well as "apocalyptic" films like THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW, GEOSTORM, and "2012". But the 21st century has also seen a fairly huge number of films that verge more on hard and realistic science fiction concepts. This particular sub-genre was likely started by director Stanley Kubrick and his groundbreaking 1968 sci-fi masterpiece 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, and continued on into the mid-1990s by Ron Howard's brilliant 1995 saga APOLLO 13 (recreating the saga of that almost-doomed 1970 lunar flight). And on occasions we have seen how science fiction can be done on relatively spare budgets, but somehow not stinting on credibility. This was the case with the 2009 film MOON, a combination of science fiction and psychological thriller components that was the directing debut for the British-born Duncan Jones.
In MOON, Sam Rockwell portrays a lunar mining engineer on a three-year contract for Lunar Industries, supplying fusion energy to an energy-depleted population back on Earth via helium and solar wind collection on the dark side of the Moon. His efforts, and those of his employers, have reduced the carbon footprint of Earth's atmosphere by close to seventy percent. But the three years of being at that base totally alone are taking their toll on Rockwell, given how absolutely homesick he is for his wife and family. His only real companion is a robotic computer (oddly) named Gerty (voice of Kevin Spacey); and absent a "real" human voice, Rockwell seems to be slowly sinking into paranoia. An accident with the lunar harvesters leaves him in a coma for several days during the final weeks of his tour of duty. But when he comes to, he finds to his shock a clone in the process of doing all his chores; and his paranoia and madness increase further. In an effort to find out more, Rockwell and his clone, along with a little bit of help from Gerty, find a storage area where there are, in fact, literally hundreds of clones of Rockwell, ready for operation if the "real" Rockwell ever got into an accident on the lunar surface (which he, of course, did); it was done as a cost-cutting operation on the part of Lunar Industries to ensure that the production of fusion energy not stop, even if Rockwell did. This will set up a showdown at the end once Rockwell is taken back to Earth.
Jones, the son of the late British rock icon David Bowie (whose 1969 hit "Space Oddity", after having been a British smash at the time of Apollo 11's landing on the Moon, became a belated U.S. hit in 1973, and jump-started his career), had a mere $5 million or so to toy with in the making of MOON, which was based on a story of his and scripted by Parker, a close friend of his. But much in the same way that Douglas Trumbull made a slim $1.2 million budget go a long way with his 1972 cult classic SILENT RUNNING, so too does Jones with MOON. And while it may be true that Jones' film takes its cue from a lot of science fiction films of previous decades, at least one can say that Jones borrowed from the better ones. Because Rockwell is virtually the only live "human" character in the film, his character functions very much the same way Bruce Dern did in SILENT RUNNING, as a caretaker of a vast resource that will prove beneficial to Earth. And of course, Spacey voicing the computer Gerty has its roots in Douglas Rain's voice of HAL 9000 in both "2001" and its much-underrated 1984 sequel "2010". MOON also ingeniously utilizes elements of such films as ALIEN, CAPRICORN ONE, and OUTLAND in its side plot of corporate malfeasance endangering its employees. The film is also helped out by a very good modernistic score by Clint Mansell, whose credits include "11:14", THE FOUNTAIN, and REQUIEM FOR A DREAM.
While MOON is not necessarily the fastest-paced film ever made, and the idea of Rockwell being on the screen all by himself for extended periods of time may not be everyone's cup of tea, Jones nevertheless makes the setting of the film, and its depictions of the desolate lunar landscape and of space itself extremely convincing on a budget that would normally not pay even for just one set piece of most Hollywood blockbusters. The final verdict is that MOON should be counted at the very least as a minor gem of a genre, science fiction, that might seem passé (but emphatically is not) in the 21st century.
MOON gets an '8' rating here.