A sci-fi film where it's the acting that counts

Rating: 9/10 (22 June 2009)

Directed by David Bowie's 38-year-old son (formerly known as Zowie), with a screenplay by Nathan Parker, 'Moon' is a curious and thought-provoking sci-fi story about a man working for an energy company, mining Helium-3 on the far side of the moon, who discovers, just as his three-year contract is ending, that he may not be going home. Sam Rockwell gets to do a virtuoso turn as alternative versions of himself (his character's name is Sam too, Sam Bell). Events are set in a traditional space station with a capacious, softly lit layout featuring the obligatory human-voiced and omnipresent computer -- mobile, not so big, a sort of clunky R2D2 -- creepily accommodating and voiced by an almost-human Kevin Spacey. It's a robot, I guess, and its name is GERTY. There are nice lunar landscapes outside where Sam sometimes rides around in a puffed-up Hummer-style Land Rover to explore or look over the machinery extracting Helium-3. Instead of the now all-too-usual and increasingly irrelevant CGI, there's more the feel of a giant mock-up in everything we see, which provides a better kind of background for what is essentially a Kafkaesque head trip. The interior isn't all modernistic chill. There's also a funky armchair reminiscent of the final sequence of '2001,' and cozy junk, even a college pennant, on the wall around Sam's bunk, sort of like a frat boy's quarters. Sam Rockwell's own appearance, his skin far from perfect and his expression a bit wacko, suggests an ordinary guy, just a worker, which is what he is, not some Astronaut.
'Moon' explores the paranoia we feel about a possible future increasingly dominated by evil, pervasive corporations -- not Big Brother, but Big Corp. It also gets at something hauntingly explored in the movie Jones's dad Bowie played an alien in in way back when, Nicholas Roeg's 'The Man Who Fell to Earth': the terrible loneliness of being out in space away from one's own kind. Sam works on the moon all by himself, and some kind of radio blockage keeps him from being in direct electronic contact with people, including his wife. There's also another aspect of space travel where distances destroy human chronology: a distorted and confused sense of time troubles Sam when he tries to figure out what's been going on with his little family back on earth. It seems like it all happened a longer time ago than he knew. Or did it maybe happen to somebody else? Such questions may arise from time to time in other space movies, but the filmmakers are usually too preoccupied with stuff like conflicts among the crew, threats from hostile invaders, or technical meltdowns to go into the full awful anomie, mega-aloneness and paranoid delusion lengthy sojourns in space are likely to induce. 'Moon,' however, has no other crew members or invaders or technical problems. Everything seems to be operating according to plan; only it's beginning to seem Sam didn't know what the whole plan was, insofar as his future is concerned. When he's out checking on something not far from the module, the vehicle gets into some kind of accident, and when he wakes up, things start to go strangely wrong. This is where the full-on head trip begins, and we, and Sam, start trying to figure out what's going on. That's all I can tell you, because it's essential that the mystery unfold on its own.
'Moon' doesn't dazzle but gives pleasure in its low-keyed conviction. It even made me think of Shane Carruth's 2004 virtually no-budget cult time-travel movie, 'Primer,' because even with relatively elaborate sets and effects, it still focuses on ideas, rather than razzle-dazzle -- on what Sam is going through, rather than what the filmmakers were up to.
Hence the key work is done by Rockwell. Sam Bell is exhausted and lonely after three years alone on the moon with only GERTY for company, and Rockwell must go through a series of reawakenings and breakdowns after he hallucinates and has that accident in the vehicle and then becomes increasingly confused, angry, and frantic about what's going on. I'm not sure Jones or Parker make the most of the situation they set up, but Rockwell's quick reactions and mood shifts hold our attention very well. As we know from 'Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,' 'Joshua,' and 'Snow Angels,' Rockwell does great mental breakdowns. This time he does rapid physical deterioration equally well. In a sense, all the most important special effects come out of the actor's bag of tricks. But that's not to forget the satisfying simplicity of the lunar landscape design sculpted by cinematographer Gary Shaw and production designer Tony Noble, or to overlook Clint Mansell's evocative musical soundscape. And when Sam confronts other versions of himself, needless to say the CGI folks were needed to pull it off within single frames.
Low keyed and a little slow, 'Moon' isn't for everyone and may seem tailored primarily for sci-fi buffs. But its disturbing exploration of identity goes back to a child's fundamental philosophical speculations: Why am I here? Who am I? How do I know I'm me?