Moon
- Year:2009
- Rating:M
- Director:Duncan Jones
- Cast:Matt Berry, Sam Rockwell, Kevin Spacey
- Release Date:October 08, 2009
- Distributor:Sony
- Running time:97 minutes
- Film Worth:$14.50
- FILMINK rates movies out of $20 - the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
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.
