Moon Blu-ray Review

Low budget science-fiction makes for high brow entertainment.

It’s a big ball of cheese in the sky.

What would happen, wondered first-time feature director Duncan Jones, if Aretha Franklin lived on it? She’d probably eat it all, he quickly concluded. So he put Sam Rockwell up there instead. You know, just to see what would happen.

As it turns out, the result was really quite something.

STORYTELLING:  

Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell, an astronaut working in about as remote a place as you can imagine – a tiny, one-man mining outpost on the dark side of the moon.

He’s been there for 3 years, away from his wife and child, entirely alone except for his robotic assistant GERTY (Kevin Spacey) and his own thoughts. His only communication with his home planet comes via pre-recorded satellite messages, received sporadically via a faulty comms link-up.

A pretty bleak way to earn a living. Let’s hope the money’s good.

And so our lonely protagonist spends his days coordinating and maintaining the ‘helium 3’ mining harvesters which scour the vast surface of the moon. It is on one such day, barely two weeks away from his trip home, while out repairing a fault on one of these machines, that Sam meets with an accident and only barely survives.

Waking up dazed back at the mining outpost, things take a rather bizarre turn as he discovers that he is no longer totally alone. He finds a perfect double version of himself, a doppelganger, if you will, inhabiting the station with him. Spooky.

It seems to me that what we have here is a science fiction movie. Not a film set in space with aliens and warp-drives and lasers and magic bloody powers. An actual work of science fiction. By this I mean (and I’m more than prepared to state that I am by no means an authority here) a film that imagines a future existence which actually raises questions about mankind and, for want of a better, less poncey expression, ‘the human condition’. Sam’s isolated existence, the necessity of his job for Earth’s survival (for ‘helium 3’ is a new, super-green source of energy), the way in which he is treated by his employers, not to mention the film’s big plot revelations, are all used to great effect by director Duncan Jones to provide us with some fascinating and actually quite intimidating existential and moral posers.

Besides the deeply philosophical script, there’s one other aspect of this film which really makes it stand out, and that’s the absolutely superb turn put on by Sam Rockwell. Considering that this is a man who has spent significant parts of his recent career lending his voice to a talking guinea pig (‘G-Force’), and whose only other sci-fi output of note is as a two-headed narcissistic space pirate (‘Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’), the sheer scale and subtlety of his performance here is pretty mindblowing.

Rockwell is on screen for almost the entire length of the movie (97 minutes), and has to spend an awful lot of that time acting opposite ‘himself’. Not an easy task, but one which Rockwell seems to have no trouble tackling, creating an entirely believable two-hander entirely on his own, backed up ably by a suitably spooky-voiced, HAL-like Kevin Spacey as GERTY, his robotic assistant-slash-butler.

Simply put, ‘Moon’ is a superb film. Eerie, contemplative and minimalist, it’s a real “thinker”, and if you’re anything like me you’ll be contemplating your own navel for days after watching it.

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