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Men In Black 3

It’s not a sequel that needed to be made, but thanks to the charm of its leads and a tone that harks back to the wit and humour of the original, it’s a pretty enjoyable trip.

Bel Ami

The excellent female support cast saves this patchy effort, which is let down by its leading man and a flat screenplay.

The Dictator

A disappointing, often repulsive and mean-spirited mess of a film with seemingly only one real criterion on its agenda: to shock and offend.

The Woman In Black

Packed with atmosphere, this old-fashioned but deftly told ghost story delivers ample chills and thrills.

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Moon (Film)

by Brian Duff | October 07, 2009 08:24 | Edited October 07, 2009 09:39

Clearly inspired by the great science fiction films of the last century, Moon still manages to be awe-inspiring and strikingly original in its own right.

Indie darling Sam Rockwell (Lawn Dogs, Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind) ratchets up his low budget credibility with the starring role in Moon, a simultaneously old fashioned and new fangled sci-fi flick from debut feature director Duncan Jones. Set in a near future in which a near infinite fuel source, Helium-3, can now be harvestable directly from the moon's surface, Rockwell plays Sam Bell, a grumpy sort, frayed around the edges from his three years on the dark - of course - hemisphere, isolated from human contact or even live video conversations with his young family. Alone with his cloying helper robot, GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey), Sam's job is to unload filled fuel containers from giant mining rovers and then shoot them back to earth for collection.

 

Dusky and cold, the film's aesthetic is of the anti-futurist style, owing a great debt to Douglas Trumbull's 1972 eco-conscious cult curio Silent Running. Like Bruce Dern's astronaut-gardener Freeman Lowell in that film, Rockwell's astronaut-miner labours under a deadening weight of unease about his daily chores, which proves prescient as the film turns on an accident involving the mining trucks some days before Sam is due to depart home. Stricken with nasty injuries and bizarre visions, it is his lot to discover - in true science fiction style - that the truth is far more nefarious than even his most fever-drenched fantasies.

 

There is also a lot of 2001: A Space Odyssey here, with a bit of Alien thrown in, but it's hardly an unoriginal or uncreative film. It is to the very promising Duncan Jones' credit that Moon has a singular, consistent voice centred on the character of Sam and his many shades, and even when the plotline occasionally loses touch with credulousness, the peculiar solemnity of Moon always puts it back on the right track.