very intriguing straightforward character-oriented sci-fi

Rating: 9/10 (8 March 2010)

The buzz I've heard around "Moon" is that it's a throwback to the more tasteful and intelligent sci-fi films of the 70s, films that didn't tend to feel the need for big action scenes with special effects to put across a theme and an idea. But I felt that it was less of a throw-back than an all-around aberration, because the story and the ideas are so straightforward that they defy also the gimmick-heavy rules of the 1970s cycle.
Sam Rockwell plays astronaut Sam Bell, a man who seems less of a scientist in the classic sci-fi sense than a technician; his job is to maintain energy gathering robot facilities on the Earth's moon, a job which is supposed to last 3 years. A delayed communications system enables him to keep in loose contact with his wife and daughter on Earth. But when a crash while repairing one of his units leaves him incapacitated, a chain of events is set into motion whereby he will discover his true identity and purpose in life, achieving a kind of existential wisdom at the expense of all possibility of happiness.
While it's starting to feel as if many of the ideas in these movies are played out – clones, artificial intelligence, space exploration, etc. – this movie took a different tack by using a very tasteful and measured narrative approach so that the character would stand up stronger than the shopworn ideas. In terms of what could actually be called "sci-fi ideas", this film is no more advanced than something like Michael Bay's "The Island" and closer to "2010" than to "2001." I found myself not caring too much because the point of the film seemed to me more based around character and story than ideas. The people behind it didn't feel the need to use a whole ton of action scenes and CGI effects just for the sake of impressing people; they just let the story be what it is and told it in a very direct way. This may be to the distaste of some sci-fi fans and also some effects fans, but I think it was an admirable effort that makes the film stand very much on its own.
Rockwell's performance is very impressive, managing to convey two different personalities present in the same person, to play the same person at two different times in his life in very different ways. The element of the story with the robot GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey, of course) looks and sounds a lot like HAL in "2001", but of course this story doesn't just take itself in the same direction but rather plays with our expectations that it might. What I really like about this movie the most is that it seems so devoid of "movie moments" – it seems unpredictable simply by being sort of predictable. I feel that the sci-fi is merely the setting for a good character-oriented story, and in that sense it's a more mature sci-fi, compared to most effects spectacles out there it's like "The Naked Spur" compared to a Gene Autry movie. It's sci-fi world is not so much a future world, or a chance to get political about energy shortages, as it is an existential examination of one man's relationship to his environment and himself.