Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is a blue-collar astronaut employee of Lunar Industries, sent to the moon to man a helium-3 harvesting station. He’s in the final weeks of his three-year stint as the harvester’s solo human supervisor, with only his overly attentive robotic companion GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey) for company. Sam whiles away the hours running on his treadmill, watching Mary Tyler Moore reruns, and watering his plant collection. His satellite connection to earth has failed, meaning he can only send and receive prerecorded messages; he watches a video from his wife and child, telling him how eager they are to see him again. After three years alone in space, he’s not in the greatest shape emotionally or physically. One day, he dodges GERTY and heads out to the mine, only to find another mangled astronaut in a wrecked tractor—an astronaut who looks exactly like him.
Moon is not shy about its influences; Duncan Jones is an obvious fan of broody, brainy seventies science fiction, where space turns out to be a lonely and distinctly miserable place. The film is a nod to both Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Stanislav Lem’s Solaris, filmed by both Andrei Tarkovsky (1972) and Steven Soderbergh (2002). Its class consciousness borrows from Sean Connery’s turn as a lunar miner battling company corruption in the 1981 film Outland, and its vision of a bleak future where technology has entirely surpassed morality is reminiscent of George Lucas’s 1971 movie THX 1138. Duncan Jones is, of course, David Bowie’s son, and Moon is in no small sense an extended-format version of Bowie’s supremely melancholy “Space Oddity.”
But like Bowie himself, Duncan Jones is far more than the sum of his influences, and his elegant parable takes on a very timely resonance in a political climate where the working class is increasingly seen as disposable. The very best science fiction uses the lens of genre to tell us about the world we live in now, and Moon—while never heavy-handed in its exploration of the morality of technology and the exploitability of labor—is no exception. It’s a thoughtful, beautifully made vehicle for big ideas, but it doesn’t lose sight of the need for a film to be about storytelling as much as insight.
Moon’s visual aesthetic bypasses the gadgetry and flashy effects of contempory, crowd-pleasing sci-fi blockbusters. The inside of Sam’s spaceship looks like a 1980s cafeteria. GERTY is boxy and awkward, moving about on a series of ceiling conduits like robotic track lighting. Its screen uses emoticons for facial expressions, an especially nice touch. The computers are clunky, bulky things more reminiscent of early Apple computers than the fluttering touchscreens of, say, Minority Report. Even Lunar Industries’ font—a dense, squared-off sans-serif—looks like something from a different era. Clint Mansell’s gorgeous and spooky score is a flawless backdrop to the movie, evoking perfectly a rich and moody atmosphere that moves gradually into the realm of the sinister. In Moon, the beauty of space is more desolate and alien than inspiring (it’s hard to believe the visually stunning film was made for under five million dollars). The movie’s tension builds so palpably that by the middle of the film I was holding my breath, waiting for something truly terrible to happen—though Moon has little in common with Alien, it manages in the same way to build an atmosphere of menace with very little action. In Moon, however, the off-screen monsters are not alien. They are very human indeed.
Moon is Sam Rockwell’s show, and he carries the movie so effortlessly it’s almost possible to overlook how extraordinary his performance is. He’s onscreen for ninety of the film’s ninety-seven minutes, and his only other real co-star is Kevin Spacey’s eerie, synthed-out voice and, well, himself. (Spacey, who couldn’t cross the street without looking creepy, is a perfect choice for cheerily sinister GERTY.) I can’t imagine any other contemporary actor who could pull off Rockwell’s bravura Everyman (or Everymen, as the case may be).
I am no stranger to the joys of the big-budget, mindless spectacle; but it’s a rare joy to find a movie that takes its audience’s intelligence seriously. Moon is a reminder of the things I love most about science fiction: a willingness to look at the world we live in now, a desire to ask serious questions about the future, and a political consciousness bundled together into what is, more than anything, a well-told story. It’s the kind of movie that seeps under your skin.
The Rejectionist is a writer and freelance editor. She blogs at www.therejectionist.com.
Yes, I quite agree, an excellent film. I’m surprised you didn’t mention Silent Running as an influence. Perhaps you haven’t seen it, in which case, watch it immediately, if you liked Moon, you’ll like that too! :-)
As much as I enjoyed Moon acting-wise, it doesn’t really take the viewers intelligence seriously. Such an elaborate scheme for something that could easily have been done with normal labor and special danger compensation is not smart, it’s simply ludicrous.
@2 – Really? It seems to me, if I was a multi-billion dollar corporation, and I needed a single-man outpost on the moon, that what was presented here was a pretty logical strategy. Ethical? Of course not. But how would shuttling multiple people, paying for their time and special dange compensation, and then returning them to earth be in any way at all cost effective when you can use disposable clones you never have to pay, and only require a single shipment to the moon to install?
You save on fuel, you save on paycheck, the moon is remote enough it’s not likely anyone will find out (except when something happens, ala the movie). The only real cost would be the cost of cloning, and even that you don’t need perfect, you only need clones that last for 3 years (plus storage.)
I don’t know, seems pretty reasonable to me as far as evil corporation schemes go.
INCyr@3; This only works for Hollywood cloning technology which bears as much resemblance to how actual cloning works as Cyrano de Bergerac’s voyage to the moon does to Apollo 11.
@3 Did the clones really last 3 years? I’ve only watched once, but I got the impression that they only lasted a few weeks, and that the scheme was for every clone to believe that he was in his final few-week stretch of a 3 year post. That way the perpetually broken comm system is more plausable.
Also the apparently huge number of stored clones is more reasonable. There appear to be hundreds of them; if they lasted 3 years, that would be hundreds of years of stock, which would be an unreasonable quantity to keep on hand (makes more sense to ship up a fresh batch once in a while, with other replacement parts).
Further, I’m not convinced that we know that the base is always manned by a clone. The robot is obviously able to independently bring up a clone when necessary, and there are other robotic/remote controlled devices. It may be that the clones are activated only when something that require a human must be done. This would allow the managment company to have someone on-site at short notice, without the support cost of a ‘real’ human there all the time.
I’m not sure I find criticizing the cloning technology of the movie is a very interesting or fruitful line of inquiry.
@6, dillettante:
It actually gives us a look into how well constructed the movie’s internal logic was. Davek’s got a very plausible explanation of it and it makes sense in a way that enhances the movie’s impact to me.
Although how a clone survived reentry in a storage pod with no cushioning or safety restraints is iffy.
amphibian@7; it’s not a plausible explanation if you know the relevant biology well.
Cloning’s a real-world technique, and a fairly solidly established one
for mammals in general. You want to clone an adult, you clone them as
an egg, they grow up same rate as any other human. If the corporate
baddies want a new Sam Bell every three weeks or every three years, they still have to go to the bother of raising that Sam Bell to adulthood at normal speed, or else there’s a sodding huge extra tech advance
hiding in there nobody’s acknowledging. The bigger the stacks of cloned Sams, the more people they are having to feed and raise to adulthood. The economics of this
are as nonsensical, though that’s not inappropriate for a film with the
premise that lunar helium-three is worth mining.
If one wants to tell a story about disposable human duplicates, it would
have worked better for me to have a Star Trek -type transporter than to have something this much misrepresenting something real-world. I
enjoyed the film, but only by thinking of it as fantasy.
dilettante@6: Would you be equally comfortable with a movie depicting a world like ours in all respects save that commercial air travel is achieved by people flapping their arms, or one where in our history Napoleon is said to have won at Gettysburg ? that’s
suspension-of-disbelief breaking at the same scale.
We’ve just started to see the results for what happens when you clone
mice, and clone the mice you get, and clone the mice you get again, for
multiple generations. To the despite of many a piece of less
well-informed SF, the results so far show that after a few generations,
the mice stay as healthy as they began, and on average, live slightly
longer.
What about growth accelerating devices and biological mechanisms?
All you need is a mind print of the original (which they have), a radically growth accelarated body that is frozen for a while at the right point of growth, is decanted, imaged with the mind print and voila – a few weeks of willing human labor.
Imagine if this was done by some process that drastically shortened telomerase or led to uncontrollable cancers/tumors/leukemias etc. Or if it was viral – something akin to HIV/AIDS.
The hard work is done growing them that fast in the first place. From then on, it’s relatively easy work to arrest everything by freezing or something, keep the clones dormant for a while and wake them up as needed. The science doesn’t have to be spot on. It just has to be relatively plausible within that specific universe.
amphibian@9; my point is that a universe in which that is plausible is not the universe in which we live.
Where precisely in what we see on screen do you read direct evidence for them having a “mind print” ? Or is that just an inference ?
@EmmetAOBrien
Actually I would totally enjoy a movie where Napoleon won at Waterloo, and then Napoleon II (or a very aged and decrepit Napoleon I) was present at the battle of Gettysburg.
The kind of twisting of history that scenario would require would be VERY interesting.
Davek: I just watched Moon this weekend, and yes, the clones last three years. The second Sam thinks he’s just started his three-year shift. (In a Q&A with Duncan Jones on the DVD, he says there are supposed to be enough clones to keep the base in operation for about 200 years, until the He-3 is mined out.)
EmmetAOBrien: It’s stated in the film that the clones have edited versions of the original Sam’s memories, which sounds like a “mind print” to me.
Really, while the cloning technology in the film obviously requires some serious scientific breakthroughs – as with many clone stories, the cloning itself is the least difficult part – I don’t have any difficulty accepting it as a science-fictional novum.
The point on which I have difficulty suspending disbelief is that, given putting new human workers on the moon is so expensive that the cloning plan looks good by comparison, wouldn’t they just dispense with the manned base entirely? They have an AI, they have automated harvesters, if necessary they should be able to take control from Earth in near-realtime… It doesn’t seem like Sam’s presence is so indispensable that they’d take the risk of setting up a secret illegal(?) cloning operation to keep him there a bit more cheaply.
Kinksville@11: So would I, despite not generally having much interest in the US Civil War. that’s why I specified “our history”, in which it would be an amazingly large error, rather than a clever alternate history, in my post above.
I spent about two minutes of this movie sarcastically thinking “Oh, just what we needed, another 2001,” before I started thinking it non-sarcastically for the remaining hour and a half.