I Think Therefore I Am

Rating: Null/10 (6 July 2009)

In the interest of full disclosure I posted this comment on the movie as a message on a general posting thread, and being somewhat lazy I did not want to make-up and entirely new one for this section of IMDb. So here it goes...
At one point Sam Rockwell's character observes that "we are people not a programme" (I am paraphrasing here)...and this single truth defines the substance and essence of "Moon".
This was the first sci-fi movie in a few years outside the Star Wars or Star Trek universes. The last movie I saw in theaters was Danny Boyle's "Sunshine". That was a fine film, but in its last act it kind of descended in pure weirdness and not in a good way, just an all-over-the-place mumbled and non-cohesive ending, for the sake of weirdness. It is too bad because the movie started promising enough.
Over the past couple of years we saw a few of these movies trying to fit into the more purist take on science fiction and eschew the sci-fi space opera genre. We had some unsuccessful attempts like "Mission To Mars" and "The Red Planet" and some which I quite like, I'm thinking of the excellent but highly underrated "Solaris" by Stephen Sodebergh and James Cameron which I truly enjoyed and liked, and consider better than Tarkovsky's version. As I read Stanislaw Lem's novel, I found Sodebergh's version to be much closer to the vision and essence of Lem's work...
Now we get "Moon", and yes it is quite a good movie, although its limited release will ensure very few people will get to see it and enjoy it. On line downloads as well as a DVD release should see that situation at least somewhat redressed. It deals with some interesting and provocative themes and ideas and its take on the subject matter is quite well and effectively presented in a great and solid but understated manner.
Yes the comparison to both "Solaris", and "2001: A Space Odyssey" is warranted as the movie does borrow certain elements and ideas from those previous movies. But I still found it really interesting and worthy of at least one viewing.
Sam Rockwell is really good in his role and I surely hope that an Oscar nomination is in the cards for him. I have not rated it as high as the average here on IMDb, but I can say with confidence that this is one of the best movies I have seen so far this year. As usual it will get drowned by the summer blockbuster cavalcade and the mindlessness of its much bigger and I daresay stupider cousins like "Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen" and "Terminator Salvation". It is curious that this movie was released during the summer, I would have thought that a fall release would have been more appropriate for such a movie, since that is traditionally the period when award contenders are released. This year those are so far and few between.
I hope more people see this film and give it a chance and not shut it down because they see it through the Kubkick or Tarkovsky/Sodebergh lens. It might make you think a bit and teach something at the same time, and these days that is indeed priceless!