Moon-age daydream

Rating: 5/10 (17 January 2013)

It's an odd coincidence that Bowie pere et fils both broke through commercial,y with space-themed works, father David Bowie with his classic single "Space Oddity" and son Duncan Jones with this offbeat science fiction movie. Both touch on themes of loneliness and remoteness too.
Watching "Moon" one is reminded of space-ship/station bound features of yesteryear, "Silent Running" and of course "2001", but director Jones boldly limits us to almost a lone actor for the duration, albeit duplicated, if not triplicated and Sam Rockwell does a good job playing essentially two sides of his own persona. The plot takes a little figuring out, but centres on prolonging the working life of employees in dangerous environments and as such has some relevance to today's technology of using robots and nano-bots to do things we humans can't.
It is though a bit of a po-faced watch, although I got the joke about Rockwell's alarm clock awakening him each day to the dulcet tunes of one-hit-wonder Chesney Hawkes "The One And Only", which he patently isn't. The special effects are actually anything but, very Gerry Anderson circa 1965 model-sets but the story's not about SFX in any case.
Maybe I just prefer my space-outpost dramas to have some rampaging evil monster on hand to up the body count, which is perhaps it didn't completely grab my attention, but it's a quirky story, with a decent twist, well told, even if it never quite took off for me.