Most science-fiction movies these days are lavish, large-scale spectacles, delivering the thrills of interplanetary travel or dystopian speculation at the risk of grandiosity and cartoonishness. In a film like J. J. Abrams’s “Star Trek,” or on television’s “Battlestar Galactica,”outer space can seem awfully crowded. “Moon,” Duncan Jones’s modest, haunting first feature, offers something of an antidote, presenting a vision of life beyond Earth that emphasizes claustrophobia and loneliness.
Filmed on soundstages at Shepperton Studios in England, “Moon” is an exercise in minimalism, paring down a complex futuristic scenario into what is essentially a one-person drama. Or perhaps a drama whose central problem is what a single human identity might entail in a world where both cloning and highly exploitative impersonal labor practices have become commonplace.
Some features of this world are sketched at the beginning, as a mock commercial explains that Earth’s energy problems have been solved by the conversion to a fuel abundantly present in lunar soil. Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), an employee of the company that extracts this resource, is reaching the end of his three-year stint as the only human inhabitant of a remote mining station. Or so it appears.
To say too much might ruin some of the surprises in this film’s spare, carefully inflected plot, which in its structure, its themes and its parsimonious exposition may remind you of a Ray Bradbury short story. Sam is not entirely alone. His companion is a computer named Gerty, whose creepy kinship with HAL 9000 from “2001: A Space Odyssey” feels even more sinister because Gerty speaks in the sardonic deadpan of Kevin Spacey. And back on Earth a wife (Dominique McElligott) and baby daughter check in now and then via video recordings because direct communication is temporarily out of service.
Or not. As his health declines and the day of his departure approaches, Sam discovers that his life on the Moon is, essentially, a fiction. He is aided in this discovery by a double, another Sam Bell, whose slight differences of temperament and attitude allow Mr. Rockwell to pull of an astonishing feat of technique, playing his own rival, foil and buddy.
And Mr. Jones, who is no doubt tired of reading that his father is David Bowie, demonstrates impressive technical command, infusing a sparse narrative and a small, enclosed space with a surprising density of moods and ideas. The gleaming white interior of the facility where Sam lives and works is at once antiseptic and a little funky, battered and smudged by the disorder that is an inevitable byproduct of human habitation.
Like much science fiction “Moon” is a meditation on the conflict between the streamlining tendencies of technological progress and the stubborn persistence of feelings and desires that can’t be tamed by utilitarian imperatives. The film’s ideas are interesting, but don’t feel entirely worked out, and Mr. Rockwell’s intriguingly strange performance (or performances) is left suspended, without the context that would give Sam’s plight its full emotional and philosophical impact. The smallness of this movie is decidedly a virtue, but also, in the end, something of a limitation.
“Moon” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has violent scenes and obscene language.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/12/movies/12moon.html?_r=0
