POSTS
I saw "Moon"
BlogI was very excited when Daniel posted the trailer for “Moon.” It looked like a slow, and elegiac science-fiction movie of the “2001” or “Solaris” model. It was indeed a movie of this variety.
While SciFi that blows stuff up and has one-liners (looking at you, Will Smith) is a dime a dozen, one that drives uncomfortable thoughts into your gray matter and makes you like it is a special type of art.
Unlikely to say: “I gotta get me one of these!”
As you may intuit from the trailer, Sam Bell is a man working on the dark side of the moon. He is bereft realtime communication and as such can only trade video mail with his wife and young daughter on Earth. He manages the miner fleet for Lunar industries, a company who has turned harvested lunar He-3 into fusion energy that powers Earth industry, cleanly, greenly. His only companion, such as it is, is a delightfully clunky AI named Gerty who is voiced by the vaguely condescendingly friendly voice of Kevin Spacey.
One fine day one of the mining vehicles is stuck, so Sam hops in a moon rover, and roves out to it but accidentally crashes into the miner owing to some hallucination. He wakes back up with Gerty telling him he had an accident and is back in the infirmary. He recovers and, against Gerty’s protests, decides to cruise out on the surface. There he finds a crashed moon rover, just like his…and therein is a man who looks just like him.
And that’s where things get paranoiac and weird.
The real interesting part is that it’s basically Sam Rockwell playing all these hallucinations(?) of himself. I really like movies like this where an actor just has to perform relative to nothing (Cast Away, for example). You really get a sense of what the actor is capable of and the measure of their commitment to the character.
This film will invariably have a short run at select theatres only, so most of you will only have the chance to see it on DVD, I recommend you take that opportunity.