Moon

Rating: 8/10 (27 July 2009)

It is a true marvel that Moon got made at all when it is so out of step with current film making trends and its all the more remarkable that it turned out to be an excellent film showcasing everything that can be good about low budget independent cinema and announces débutant director Duncan Jones as a real talent to watch in the future. The film stars Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell, the one man crew of a mining station on the dark side of the moon on a three year contract with only an endlessly cheery computer GERTY, voiced with brilliantly creepy calm by Kevin Spacey, for company. While the base is mainly automated Sam is required for maintenance and monitoring. His live communication link to Earth is down and he relies on video messages from his wife and child for comfort as he comes up to the end of the contract and the limits of his sanity. Whilst on a routine repair mission to one of the base's remote harvesters he suffers a bad accident and well, to reveal further would ruin the movie.
Sam is one of Rockwell's best performances in a roller-coaster career, here he is able to constrain the 'zanier' aspects of his performances whilst still portraying someone on the ragged edge of their soul. His character wears the psychological scars of such extreme loneliness with such pitiable sadness that within minutes of the film's opening the audience has to question what kind of man would submit to these conditions, that reveal, when it comes, is a quite brilliant turn. Whilst praising Rockwell's performance I have to mention Spacey's voice acting that uses age old sci fi conventions about thinking computers to twist our expectations and encourages the audience to speculate ad constantly re-evaluate GERTY's motivations. GERTY'S design also evokes sci fi of old with his clunky panels and simple smiley face screen, a facet reflected in the base itself. A sparse and dirty environment, giving the impression of industrial space exploration, not the sleek lines and lens flares of the modern Star Trek but a vision of corporate exploitation. Everything about the base, from its single person crew to its basic food and living quarters and its clunky moon buggies reeks of a company spending as little money as possible for the biggest profit. The whole piece represents a throwback to the paranoia of the 1970's, sci fi's boom years, when space was seen as just another place ripe for exploitation by greedy corporations and authoritarian governments.
When sci fi was created it was typically used as a means with which to examine humanity in extreme circumstances and the universality of the human experience. That has become lost lately, and notably this summer, as it becomes a tool for Hollywood to create ever larger explosions and ever shallower characters. This summer has already seen Wolverine, Star Trek, Terminator: Salvation and Transformers 2 assault the senses to varying degrees of success but with hardly a moment for the audience to catch their breath between them they epitomise the ultra high tempo of modern sci fi film-making. In that context Moon slow, thoughtful approach comes as a real shock to the system, here characters engage and discuss, they contemplate in silence as they try to comprehend the enormity of their discoveries and when the twists come they are slow reveals that the audience are trusted to understand without a flip chart and diagrams. Moon is one of those interesting, neat films that come along every so often to show what sci fi can still achieve and is destined for a long life on DVD. A thoroughly recommend sci fi slow burner on the nature of identity, find it, watch it, discuss it.