I had been planning to watch Moon ever since it came out in 2009. I even once suggested it to a friend, but she said it must be some rubbish because it wasn’t in the major cinemas and nobody knew about it, so we went to see The Time Traveler’s Wife instead. Well, I got to see Moon anyway, although with a two-year delay.
It is the not very distant future. The Earth, as we all feared, ran out of energy resources, but it became possible to generate energy from Helium-3 excavated from the Moon. Around 70% of the world energy is now coming from this source. Lunar Industries runs the mining program on the Moon where its harvesters are digging for Helium-3 and bases monitor the process.
Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is a Lunar employee with a three-year contract which is running out in a couple of weeks, which means Sam is going home where his wife Tess and little daughter Eve are waiting for their great astronaut. Sam sends messages back to Earth in hundreds, but the communication system is damaged, so direct communication is impossible and the only video messages he receives from his family are recorded and delivered with a delay. Loneliness and isolation are driving Sam mad, literally: he is irritable, he talks to himself, he sees people. To cope with the psychological challenges Sam looks after his plans at the base and works on a wooden model of his home town. Oh well, and the base robot GERTY also keeps him company and looks after his physical and mental health.
One day though a hallucination drives Sam into an accident, which also damages a harvester. Sam wakes up in the infirmary where GERTY is running health checks on him. Affected by partial memory loss, Sam cannot understand how he ended up there if GERTY moves only inside the base. And why is GERTY having a real-time conversation with Lunar Industries if there is no direct signal? But it is just the beginning…
Proper sci-fi is hard to find these days and, judging by Moon’s humble $5 million budget, is also hard to sell to investors, even if you are David Bowie’s son. But Duncan Jones did a fantastic job on his debut film, there’s no doubt about it.
Despite being a fairly new film and talking about a relatively near future, the film has a lot of 70′s feel about it. The base and Sam’s costume are fully archetypal and GERTY, who must be following the Three Laws of Robotics, is also somewhat old-fashioned. Too bulky for the future, with only a basic screen changing with its mood, and permanently attached to the base.
Stylistically and philosophically the film certainly made me think of the 1972 Solaris and no doubt there are references to Kubrick (it’s just that I haven’t seen 2001: A Space Odyssey yet, so can’t talk about them). Moon certainly made me think about The Island (2005) which started in a very promising way and then degraded into an ordinary action film. This never happens to Moon.
I can understand my friend who didn’t want to see Moon. The film is quite slow-going and minimalistic. It is so chambery that you can stage it in theatres. Nor is it packed with action, space mutants and time travellers. No, Moon delivers perfectly well the austere and lonely atmosphere of a Moon base, so fast action and heroic speeches to the sounds of the national anthem are out of the question. And that’s the beauty of Moon – its simplicity, organic special effects, and the cast of just a few people out of whom we see only one most of the time, all these things take us closer again to the art of cinema and prove how little you need to make a decent film as long as talent is component number one.
Even Moon’s music theme is simple and yet very atmospheric. I am pretty sure I heard it in documentaries and TV programs, just didn’t know where it came from. Well, now I know: it came from Moon.
I can’t help mentioning that Sam Rockwell did a great job carrying the whole film on his shoulders, just like his character Sam Bell was running a whole Moon base on his own. To think that he played the hateful immoral criminal in The Green Mile 10 years before Moon! That’s amazing. Of course, Kevin Spacey made his contribution as GERTY’s voice too. And GERTY is one strange metal thing. I was suspicious of it till the end.
I’d love to discuss more, but don’t want to publish any spoilers, not for this film. It will certainly give you some food for thought and discussion. About the moral borders of a human life and its value against the benefits for humanity, about honesty, ethics, and even the purpose of life.
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