The Man in The Moon

Rating: 10/10 (9 October 2009)

Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is the man in the moon. Sam is the lone astronaut on a moonbase on the far side of the moon. He's there to mine helium that is then transported back to Earth. The mining is done remotely, huge machines roam the lunar landscape vacuuming up rocks and dust, extracting the helium. It is Sam's job to retrieve the canisters of helium and ship them off to Earth for consumption. Sam's only companion on the moonbase is Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey) which oversees most of the base's operations.
Sam is on the last 2 weeks of his three year contract and eagerly awaits his return to see his wife and daughter. Sam is starting to feel the effects of his solitude, he's starting to hallucinate. On one of his runs to retrieve a helium canister and he starts hallucinating causing a collision with the mining machine. Sam awakes to find himself in the medical bay of the moonbase, unable to remember how he got there. He fakes a hull breach to get Gerty to let him outside the moonbase. He returns to the crash site and rescues an astronaut that looks exactly like him. Is Sam hallucinating again? Is he a clone? Is the rescued astronaut a clone? Can he even be sure of what is real? Or what is human? These are the questions Moon's director Duncan Jones presents his audience. While there are no overt references there are echoes of 2001: A Space Odyssey and maybe Alien. While Gerty isn't as malevolent as HAL in 2001 it is a distant cousin to HAL, and perhaps less duplicitous than MOTHER in Alien. Some of the sets seem a little reminiscent of 2001 maybe that's because Jones has been influenced by it. Jones has made an excellent, thought provoking alternative to the more vapid summer blockbuster movies. Go see this before Jones is swallowed up by Hollywood for Transformers 3.