man and moon
i spent independence day camped out at the arclight for a double feature of moon and the hurt locker.
i’d heard moon was a smart, indie sci-fi film starring sam rockwell (and directed by someone who had the amazing good genetic fortune to be david bowie’s son). i have a thing cerebral, quirky genre flicks (see also: let the right one in, as well as gattaca, soderbergh’s solaris, roman coppola’s cq, gilliam’s 12 monkeys (and progenitor la jetee) and a bunch of others on my all-time favorite list, going all the way back to college when peter greenaway’s the falls blew my mind. i have yet to fully recover.
bad news first: moon is not in the same league as those works, not that i expected it to be. it is, however, an impressive debut film, technically and artistically, and worth seeing if you enjoy a good science fiction short story. or spending 90 minutes with sam rockwell. (i like both.)
we open on a mining operation on the moon, staffed by exactly one man and one talking, rolling computer. the man, sam bell, is nearing the end of his 3 year stint monitoring the largely automated process that harvests clean, carbon-free “helium-3” energy from the moon’s crust and ships it back to earth. this new energy has saved humanity from scarcity and the scourge of global warming, and sam bell is a hero for dedicating 3 years of his life to helping all mankind.
or maybe not. once the film establishes the rhythm and routine of sam’s lonely life, things start to get weird. sam starts hallucinating. sam gets into an accident. sam gets amnesia. sam has reason to suspect gerty, the robot computer, is hiding something from him. sam comes face to face with the big lie, sam struggles to put the truth back together.
i don’t want to give away too much as odds are high you haven’t seen moon yet; the story takes an interesting turn that is better left unspoiled. (if you have seen it and want to discuss it more detail, feel free to be spoiler-y in the comments.)
the science is mostly crap (helium-3?) and there are a host of reasons why the predicament sam finds himself in makes little sense - scientifically, economically, logically or even sociologically.
but the plot holes hardly matter - none of it is likely to cross your mind until long after the credits roll. what the director duncan jones does so well is create a profound sense of loneliness, into which he inserts a sympathetic, realistically flawed character who struggles intelligently to make the best of a bad situation. sam rockwell does a masterful job. when was he last less than riveting?
the film looks great - the station is clean and bright but clearly lived-in, in ways that carry more meaning as the movie goes on. for a film set in space, it mostly has its head down, except for one poignant moment when we and sam look at the earth above, enormous and beautiful and completely out of reach.
my biggest complaint with moon is jones’s choice of kevin spacey for the voice of gerty. gerty is a near descendent of 2001’s hal, and i think that spacey’s slightly nasal, untrustworthy deadpan makes the comparison a little too obvious. his baked-in smarminess frequently pulled me right out of the movie.
i’ve spent the last day contemplating other choices. so far, i think i would have gone with brad dourif or possibly willem defoe. both actors can mix menacing and vulnerable in their voice in a way that i haven’t heard spacey attempt.
(a smaller complaint is the unneeded and unwelcome last 15 seconds of plot resolution; i suspect it came at the insistence of some studio suit with a fear of ambiguity and a fetish for closure.)
moon is a film about loneliness, about rootlessness. about counting down the days until you can go home, except that even when you’re there, you’re not home. it’s about men who need to be far from the women they still desire, about fathers counting down the days until they can hold their children.
it’s about trying to remain safe in a barren, inhospitable place. it’s about sacrifice, loyalty, courage, trust. about having faith in a mission and falling for a lie. about men showing their love through their fists, bonding through violence, washing away the blood.
moon is about all those things. and so is the hurt locker, as i discovered about 3 hours later. it was almost startling to realize how much thematic material the films shared, despite vastly different settings and stories. i’ll follow up with more on kathryn bigelow’s best film since near dark in a few days.
