Moon (***½)

Directed by: Duncan Jones
Starring: Sam Rockwell, Kevin Spacey (Voice), Dominique McElligott
Seen: October 25th 2009

***½ Out of ****

Sam Bell (Rockwell) is working on the moon, alone. His job is to maintain and operate a mining station that is mostly automated, and he is on a 3-year contract with his employer, Lunar Industries. He has two weeks left on this contract, and is, quite understandably, very excited about going home and seeing his wife (McElligott) and little daughter again. The moon-base was established to harvest Helium-3, which is now the prime source of energy on earth, and Sam simply collects full canisters of Helium-3 from the four harvesters deployed to automatically route themselves across the surface of the moon: Matthew, Mark, Luke (struck out and renamed Judas on one control screen), and John.

Sam is kept company on base by GERTY 3000L (voice of Kevin Spacey), a robot that assists Sam with his job. GERTY displays emoticons on a small screen to indicate how he “feels”, and is reminiscent of HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. As his time draws to an end, Sam has strange sightings, he sees a teenage girl, first in the Base, sitting in his chair, then on the lunar surface as he is driving in a moon rover to collect canisters from a harvester. This distracts him and he crashes into the harvester. When he wakes up in the infirmary, GERTY is there to check up on him, and to confine him to the base while he recovers. He manages to get GERTY to allow him outside, and drives to the crash site, where he finds a man in the crashed rover. He takes this man back to base, and realises this man is him. This causes a few pretty awkward scenes back at the base as he (both versions of him) is not quite sure whether he is seeing things or hallucinating himself walking around on-base, and the quest to figure it all out is a strange and involving one indeed.

Moon is Duncan Jones’ (David Bowie’s son) feature film debut, and is brilliantly made in every aspect. The special effects where Sam Rockwell interacts with himself are seamless, the space station is completely believable, and the back story is also extremely well set-up. And a well-produced advertisement for Lunar Industries, which starts the movie, is a great introduction to the story. Sam Rockwell gives an excellent and forceful performance as the same man in two stages of development/awareness, and even though the story is (at least for now) pure science fiction, he makes it all completely believable with his strong emotional portrayal of Sam Bell version 1, and his more calculating portrayal of Sam Bell version 2. The visuals of the film are absolutely sumptuous, and you never doubt the authenticity of that which is portrayed on-screen for even a second.

This is a great movie starring a great actor that (unfortunately) not all of us will get the opportunity to see. Moon won’t fall in everybody’s realm of preferred entertainment, as is partially evident from the fact that it is a Science Fiction film being released on the Art-house circuit, but it is a brilliant story with a climax that leaves you with a few of the quintessential human feelings (each one applicable to a specific character at the end of the movie): Sadness, Pity and the best one of them all right before the credits start rolling, Hope.