Space is getting more and more philosophical these days in movies. I don’t have a problem with that. I find space to be fascinating. And if any filmmaker, such as Duncan Jones, who’s made his directorial debut with Moon, wants to explore space as an outlet for the ideas that float between planets, I’m all for it. There’s a lot of stuff out there, the unexplainable, the unknown, the ungovernable. NASA can’t look for those, and as a human being, I still have the desire to find out what I don’t know.
Is Moon a space movie? Of course, the film is set in space. I’ve tried to define the space thriller. Maybe a film that has a central question, one that can’t be answered on the soil we know and has to be taken beyond our atmosphere to be resolved.
Moon has a central question. However, it doesn’t fall into the likes of, “can this happen?” From that question could sprout the how and the why, the cause and the effect, and the ever-present realism that evokes us to pay attention to the message. Instead, the movie, for a lack of a better word, settles for the question, “what if this happened?” A space movie is relatively short-sighted when it has a generic situation rather than an alternative, or even an existent, timeline. The latter is uninteresting because we can all invent it. “Moon” is inventive, but not all inventions have to be eternal.
The movie’s set on, you guessed it, the moon, ours, to be exact. Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell, the sole astronaut manning a mining station on the surface of the moon. He’s employed by Lunar Industries, a humongous corporation back on earth running on its production of fuel derived from below the moon’s surface. With his operating system, GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacy), keeping him company, Sam counts off the remaining few days left in his three-year shift until another worker makes the journey to replace him.
Can’t really say anything from there. To give away anything else would be to give away the direction in which the ending flows. Not necessarily a bad thing. I wouldn’t keep the plot a secret if I knew it didn’t have any semi-intriguing surprises in store. It’s that the movie might be made of only those surprises that’s a little underwhelming. And they could very well be surprises just to be surprises.
Moon owes a lot to 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, arguably Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, which ventured through a psychedelic montage of the universe into the uncharted. It’s not only that GERTY is the equivalent of HAL (whether he’s malicious or not I won’t tell), or that much of the equipment on board has the familiar sheen and perfection that set “2001” apart. Loneliness, commercialism, and humanity are all big themes surrounding Sam and his search to find out what his company hasn’t told him.
The movie’s curious that way. When it should be building things up, it lets everything awkwardly unfold, hitting lower notes rather than higher ones. Clever as some digital sight gags may be, the film just rests on them. It’s too loyal to a storyline to bring something new, and it’s too detached to bring up something solidly simple.
Something to enjoy is the presence of Rockwell, a strong comic actor who’s welcome on screen. If anything, we enjoy that Rockwell solves his mystery, even if it’s a mystery we’re half-interested in. He rides on real emotions, which are hard to go by when you’re the only person on the floating rock you’re on, and his characteristics show attachment to their environment that can be pulled and tugged.
Given that he’s the only human on screen, Moon doesn’t have an acting problem. If there was one thing I could say about this film, it would be that it’s raw story. Whether writer Nathan Parker thought it would be sufficient or Jones emphasized it, a few blips, sparkles, or messages in any respect in between would have been nice. Without them, the movie sort of flatlines, just under where we want it to be.
