Review of “Moon”
In space – at least at the movies – things are never what they seem, and in this moody, brooding low-key sci-fi feature, director Duncan Jones makes the most of the eeriness and solitude of long-distance separation to explore some very poignant themes of memory and existence. It’s a thoughtful and carefully paced debut feature, making up for any lack of driving narrative with its existential tone.
Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is less an astronaut than a maintenance engineer, stuck in a dusty moon base named Serang to monitor the mining operations of Lunar Industries – a company that extracts Helium 3 to send to earth to help cope with an energy crisis. Sam’s three year contract is about to finish and he’s looking forward to getting back home to see his wife Tess and baby daughter Eve. Although Serang’s communication system is playing up – preventing live conversations - Sam gets frequent video messages from Tess. Inside Serang, Sam’s only companion is a robot named GERTY (voice of Kevin Spacey) who seems dedicated to Sam’s welfare. But when Sam starts to feel unwell and see strange visions, his perception of his distant reality is slowly and chillingly broken apart and GERTY’s carefully written dialogue gets as coolly ominous as that other famous space station voice – HAL9000.
If anyone tries to tell you more than this about the film before you’ve seen it – resist. Put your fingers in your ears and do the la-la-la thing. The film’s main strength is the narrative premise behind Sam & what he’s really doing on the moon and it’s important to slowly experience Sam as he works out the emotional implications of what is really going on.
Written by Jones and Nathan Parker especially for Sam Rockwell, the film has echoes of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris along with the quieter sci-fi films from the late 1970s like Alien and Silent Running – it’s all about the mood rather than the technology. Clint Mansell’s musical score is a key component in creating the right tone for a man who is lost somewhere between doubt and hope, and Rockwell is superb in a deeply complex role with little but himself to deal with. The production design is clearly influenced by 2001: A Space Odyssey, with Jones thankfully relying upon models rather than CGI to create his mining moonscape. Overall Jones has created a beautiful and haunting film, with only a small lapse of confidence about what to do with the story once it’s unfolded in the final act.
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