Once, maybe more in a blue 'Moon'
Moon
Running time: 97 minutes
MPAA rating: R (profanity, adult situations, brief nudity)
On the Web
For some time now, I've had this germ of an idea for a sci-fi movie. A family is driving home, entering their neighborhood, when they see an SUV in front of them that looks just like theirs.
Same model. Same color, same school stickers on the back window.
When the family pulls up alongside to take a look, they're flabbergasted to see that inside the other SUV is another set of them.
That's all I've got so far. I said it was a germ of an idea.
I thought about that quite a bit watching "Moon," a thinking man's outer-space sci-fi drama starring Sam Rockwell.
Rockwell, a very good character actor last seen as one of David Frost's investigators in "Frost/Nixon," portrays a blue-collar mining station caretaker ending a three-year contract with Lunar Industries on the far side of the moon.
Mechanical drones do the heavy work. Sam Bell (Rockwell) occasionally ventures out to harvest cannisters of Helium-3, the new clean source of energy for Earth.
Sam works and lives alone on the Sarang moon base, where he's mostly confined to stark quarters. When he's not whittling wood into a miniature model of his small hometown, he's looking forward to reuniting with his wife Tess and 3-year-old daughter Eve. A technical glitch prevents the desperately lonely lunar worker to speak to them directly, however.
Instead, Sam receives recorded video messages from his wife periodically, and he can record messages for her. Sam's only companion, if we can call it that, is Gerty, the station's computer (voiced by Kevin Spacey).
It's obvious early on that "Moon" director/co-writer Duncan Jones isn't just an average fan of sci-fi. Jones clearly respects the vintage tales that spilled philosophy right along with the outer-space drama.
The isolation aspect made me think right away of "Silent Running," the 1972 sci-fi drama starring Bruce Dern as a lone astronaut tending Earth's last nature reserve in space. And, of course, the lonely man/vocal computer element reminds one of "2001: A Space Odyssey," Stanley Kubrick's 1968 classic.
This is the first feature film for Jones, a former wild-cam operator for director Tony Scott, and screenwriter Nathan Parker. They manage to make "Moon" their own. They've got a modest budget to work with (in the $5 million range). Even so, the lunar locale looks authentic, and Jones layers computer graphics over model sets to keep the cost within range.
That makes it all that more important for Rockwell (edgy acting dynamite in David Gordon Green's "Snow Angels") to command our attention in what, for all practical purposes, is a one-man play much of the time.
The good news is that Rockwell pulls it off.
Strange things begin to happen to Sam in the final days of his contract. This is not the kind of film where too much of the plot needs to be disclosed. The personal note at the beginning of this review should serve as a hint, however.
"Moon," well-acted by Rockwell , provides excellent homage to the sci-fi gems with something to say. You know, the ones like "Silent Running," "2001" and "Blade Runner" that filled screens before morphing hardware ("Transformers 2," etc.) took over.
Comments