A very engaging and solidly-written hard sci-fi film that deserves far more of an audience than some of the more popular summer schlock this season. Go see it now!
Written by Duncan Jones and Nathan Parker
Directed by Duncan Jones
---Cast
Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell
Kevin Spacey as Gerty
Dominique McElligott as Tess Bell
Kaya Scodelario as Eve Bell
Benedict Wong as Thompson
Matt Berry as Overmeyers
Malcolm Stewart as The Technician
Moon at Wikipedia
Amid the cacophony of summer action blockbusters, Moon represents an attempt at what one science fiction creator referred to as “quietly doing good work”. Moon is a “hard” science fiction story set at a helium-3 mining facility on the dark side of the Moon, manned by only one man, Sam Bell (played by Sam Rockwell of Galaxy Quest, and The Green Mile), a lonely blue collar worker for Lunar Industries, who spends his days alone at Sarang, the station in question, occasionally inspecting and repairing the otherwise automated machines, his only companionship aside from messages from home a robot with a human-like personality named Gerty, voiced by Kevin Spacey. The science fiction in the story is straightforward and utilitarian, much like Sam’s antiseptic, 2001: A Space Odyssey-inspired surroundings, with the element of lunar mining providing the initial setup and setting, while another premise provides the conflict, when Sam begins to hallucinate, and comes to suspect that Lunar Industries intends to replace him, and in a way far more sinister and disturbing than anything involving a pink slip.
Although this plot point is a cliché seen in countless sci-fi movies and TV shows like as Event Horizon, Sphere and Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes like “Frame of Mind” and “Phantasms”, the strength of how the creators deftly use it lies in the how they exploit the audience's expectations influenced by those prior encounters with it, and then shatter them by committing to a more ambitious direction, one with a grander and more disturbing tone to it, one that questions the essential nature of what it is to be human. Writer/director Duncan Jones and cowriter Nathan Parker are not kind to Sam, nor to an audience that would rather coddle him with a telegraphed, happily simplistic answer to his conundrum. They also effectively convey Sam’s anxieties to the audience by shifting character focus, creating an vicarious unease in the viewer not unlike that conveyed by Akiva Goldsman and Ron Howard's approach to illustrating John Nash’s schizophrenia in A Beautiful Mind. The creators admirably eschew any overly histrionic camera movement or excesses of music in order to provoke our feeling of suspense. Instead, the camera work is restrained, almost Spartan, much like everything else in the aforementioned production design. While the special effects are convincing, there are no big Gosh Wow moments as in Star Trek. The tension is instead elicited through the unfolding story, as Sam comes to discover some terrifying truths about himself and the company he works for.
About Kevin Spacey’s performance as Gerty not much can be said. Choosing him to voice Gerty was not a bad idea, but in using such a big star, there was almost a sense of anticipation, as if I were expecting Something BigTM to happen, in order to justify his casting. In seeing him in the opening credits, I couldn’t help but be reminded of that moment in Se7en when Somerset and Mills first speak to John Doe on the phone, and I thought that it sounded like Kevin Spacey, but then dismissed the idea, thinking that such a star would’ve been in the opening credits were it him. Spacey’s voice in Moon presents the opposite expectation—that the presence of someone like him, as well as Gerty’s obvious similarities to HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey (HAL had a red eye, Gerty has a blue one), and what happened with HAL in that film, lend the viewer to automatically assume that Gerty will eventually go berserk at some point—yet another point upon which it seems the creators exploited audience anticipation of clichés in order to veer in a completely unexpected direction. What Gerty does do is surprising, but not in a way that I think really utilized the character’s potential as it could have (see Spoiler Nit below if you dare). While the use of the emoticons was a clever incorporation of contemporary Internet memes into of Gerty’s design and personality, and his name a possible reference to Windsor McCay’s obedient dinosaur, Gerty represents an instance in which it seems the creators zagged just for the sake of not zigging.
The ultimate success of the story, however, is in drawing in the viewer to care deeply about Sam, to sympathize with him, to care about whether he ultimately succeeds in his mission in life, while making us genuinely wonder what will happen next, something that one doesn’t see too often from Hollywood.
The movie is currently playing in selected cities, and it may be difficult for some to see it in theaters, but if you’ve been disappointed with any of the other summer sci-fi films so far this summer, get to see this film if you can. If you’re like me, you’ll be walking out pleased.
---Spoiler Nits
Most of these are Spoiler Nits, so I just formatted the entire section in white.
Note: For this discussion I will refer to the first Sam Bell clone—the one who starts off the story, gets bloodied, sick, and ends up being left in the lunar rover by the end of the film, as “Sam1”, and the second one, who is essentially the alpha character that drives the rest of the film after his awakening following Sam1’s injury, as “Sam2”.
Is it really a good idea for Sarang to be operated by only one person? Who decided that this was psychologically healthy, even for clones?
Why is Sam2 completely unfazed by Sam1 after Sam1 wakes up? Sam1 is understandably freaked out when he sees Sam2, but Sam2 only begins to sense something’s amiss when he realizes that something about his appearance on Sarang doesn’t add up. Shouldn’t he be shocked about the guy who looks just like him and has the same name? I mean, he is when he first finds the Sam1 in the lunar rover and brings him back to Sarang, but when the Sam1 wakes up, Sam2 seems nonplussed.
The biggest plot hole is why Gerty helps Sam almost entirely throughout the film, when Lunar Industries should’ve programmed him in line with their need to keep the clones’ nature a secret from them. Why would they program him so that, when Sam first asks if he’s a clone, Gerty gives an evasive, indirect answer, as opposed to a convincing lie, and that when Sam tells Gerty that he’s been inside the clone storage room, Gerty merely says, “Oh, you weren’t supposed to go in there.” I don’t necessarily relish knee-jerk reliance on clichés or gratuitous action, but in this particular case, having Gerty try to stop Sam from implementing his plan, much as he tried to keep Sam from going outside after he was first awakened (which was the proper way for Gerty to have behaved) seems to have been called for here. And if not that, then a far better explanation of why Gerty was so cooperative than the anemic “I’m supposed to make you happy.” Since the second Sam clone was able to find the truth by essentially slipping through a crack in the system, so to speak—and this can be a commentary on the essential nature of either the original Sam Bell’s personality, or the one(s) developed by the clone(s)—a far better explanation of why this happened with Gerty should’ve been written. Some type of routine maintenance or repair in which the portion of Gerty’s program responsible for keeping the clones a secret and/or preventing them from learning about it or rebelling could’ve been removed or damaged inadvertently, and this would’ve been a better explanation. Or was Gerty indeed malfunctioning in some way, and this was the creators' way of commenting on the nature of humanity--making him give an evasive answer, for example, because that's what a human would do, in order to imply that Gerty was becoming more human, and therefore comment that if he can become so human, that a clone should also keep in mind that he is too, even if he's a clone?
So why exactly did Sam1 bleed so easily during his struggle with Sam2, and get sicker and sicker, coughing blood and losing teeth? In watching the film, I theorized that his body was breaking down because the clones were deliberately designed with planned obsolescence, and would begin to die after three years, in order to more easily control them. I figured that one way or another, the answer to this question would be given by the end of the film, but I don’t recall it, and I never left the auditorium. Did they give it, and I missed it, or were we intended to simply surmise it on our own?
So why/how did the digging vehicle (I forget what they called them) run into the jamming antenna at the end of the film? I presume that Sam2 sabotaged it to do this, but I don’t recall this ever being indicated. Was this yet another thing that the creators wanted us to understand? Or did they want to leave it open to interpretation?
Okay, so we now know that the multiple Sams were not hallucinations but clones. But then what were those hallucinations that Sam1 saw in the beginning of the film—the girl sitting in his armchair, the jump cut in Tess’ video message to him, etc.? Were these neurological harbingers of his body’s impending breakdown?