My name is Sam Bell, I had an accident and I woke up on the Moon and found I was already there, am I mad, am I in a coma, or have I gone back in time....
In Duncan Jones’s film Moon, Sam Rockwell, plays Sam Bell, the sole human occupant of a mining facility on the far side of the moon, that supplies helium 3 for fusion reactors, which according to the fake advert that opens the movie have solved the Earth’s energy crisis.
His only company is GERTY 3000, a computer with a robot arm and moveable monitor, voiced by Kevin Spacey, who is obviously a cousin to HAL 9000, and like HAL knows more about the mission than he’s admitting. GERTY’s function is to look after Sam.
However, all is not well, the base is high tech, but battered and grungy, direct communications to earth are off-line since the communications satellite that provides it is out of action and repairing it is not on the company's list or priorities – all communications are coming via deep space relay stations, which because of the time lag means direct conversations are impossible, so all Sam has are recorded messages from his wife.
It’s two weeks from the end of Sam's three-year contract, and he suspects he’s starting to lose the plot, when he sees a dark haired girl in the base.
When one of the vast mining machines malfunctions, he goes to fix it and has an accident when he spots the girl again, standing out on the surface of the moon. When he wakes up from the accident, (or does he?) he finds that there are two of him.
If you’re a long standing SF fan you’ll probably work out what’s going on before GERTY reveals the truth about what the corporation’s up to. However, what’s impressive about the film is the performance by Sam Rockwell as the two Sam’s, who are different stages of their life, and the script which plays with Phillip K Dickian, notions of reality and who is human. It also looks at what loneliness will do to you.
The SFX advance the story rather than be overwhelm it or become its raison d’etre. Unlike most SF films, the moon exteriors are models and mattes, a bit reminiscent of Space 1999 and I mean that in a good way, with only minor CGI enhancements.
Why the Life on Mars reference upfront? Well director Duncan Jones is the son of a certain David Jones, also known as Bowie, also the film could have been made in the early 70s, pre-Star Wars where you got SF movies that weren’t mainly about spectacle (there’s been a few since, but you probably wouldn’t get a Silent Running these days), there’s also something of Dark Star about it and a bit of Solaris.
It’s an intelligent, well made (on a miniscule budget), SF film so it probably won’t do as well as something big and dumb. See this film, we need more SF that doesn’t rely on aliens and space battles.
