I woke up this morning thinking I really needed to just go ahead and blog about Moon, one of the best movies I’ve seen recently. I’ve been thinking about it for a few weeks now, but today the above title came to me and as a result I’ve had the Lou Reed song I borrowed it from running through my head all day.
Moon is the first feature film directed by Duncan Jones, son of David Jones (aka David Bowie), starring Sam Rockwell and the voice of Kevin Spacey. There are a handful of other actors listed in the credits, but these are limited to appearing in video transmissions from Earth to the facility on the moon where the story takes place.
Rockwell plays a character aptly named Sam, while Spacey is his robotic companion GERTY (the acronym stands for something, I’m sure, but in an interview I saw Duncan Jones claims he can’t remember). Sam is the seemingly-lone worker in a facility on the moon, the function of which is to extract Helium-3 from moon rocks. As he nears the end of his three-year contract, the viewer sees just how lonely and isolated Sam has become. Due to some kind of accident early in his contract, live communication with Earth is impossible, so he must rely on recorded video transmissions to interact with his wife and the daughter who was born after he left Earth.
As Sam gets closer to the end of his contract, he’s also losing his marbles just a little bit. He begins to have hallucinations and ultimately is involved in an accident in one of the vehicles he uses to make maintenance trips out to the harvesters. Yeah, nothing but moon for miles and you manage to crash? Some bad driving there, Sammy.
From here, the story takes a few interesting turns and if you haven’t seen it yet I suggest you do. And I further suggest if you haven’t been spoiled for anything in the movie, don’t do any kind of reading up on it. I knew a little bit going into it, and though it didn’t ruin it for me, it did have an effect on the impact that the story had upon me. That said, it’s a great movie, one I’ll be watching again and one I’d highly recommend to anyone.
While there is the obvious 2001: A Space Odyssey connection–GERTY is very much a nod to HAL9000–the movie I was most reminded of was Silent Running, which starred Bruce Dern as one of three men on a spaceship left in care of the Earth’s last remaining live plants.
Anyhow, see it. It’s really very good. And as I mentioned earlier, that it was completely overlooked in Sunday night’s Celebrity Fashion Show and Awards Ceremony is proof that there’s something very wrong with that show.