Moon

This is the story of Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), an employee of Lunar Industries who has spent the last three years on a contracted job supervising the work being done by machines harvesting Helium 3 - a substance that produces clean energy for all of the planet Earth - on the moon. For company - and to help keep him safe - Sam has Gerty, a robot helper (voiced by Kevin Spacey).

There are echoes of 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining (sort of) here, but Moon borrows only tangentially from the earlier pictures; and when Sam has an accident with his “car” early in the film, we get echoes of a third movie as director Duncan Jones begins to unspool his story. Unfortunately, telling you what that third movie is would spoil some of the plot and diminish the effectiveness of a reveal scene toward the end of the first act.

And even though you’ll probably puzzle out most of the mysteries in the story, it should be noted that Jones does a very good job of managing its progression in such a way that the reveals work like slow poison and come across as both inevitable and unexpected - no small achievement for a guy making his big-screen feature directorial debut.

One of the things I thought Moon did particularly well was hit certain plot points head on, rather than use overly-complex sleight of hand or outright obfuscation; it’s not a mystery, and it does not fall into the sci-fi trap of thinking that it’s supposed to be. It’s okay to have a straighforward story out in space, and this is especially refreshing with respect to Gerty, the robot that is there to help Sam - and what’s refreshing is that this turns out to be true. Gerty really is there to help Sam, not just to serve the corporate masters - his honesty is a page straight out of Asimov, even if Gerty isn’t exactly forthcoming on his own. But once Sam comes to understand a few things about his situation, he is able to put Gerty to use with little trouble.

I also thought the music was excellent. I’ve read that the mark of a good film score is that you don’t notice it while you’re watching the movie - the implication being that a noticeable score is an obtrusive one. I disagree. A good score augments a film in subtle ways, without being bombastic; articulates mood and tone in ways that spoken lines and human actors cannot; and, most obviously, heightens suspense. I think a better analogy would be to comic books - a good score does much the same thing that a good inker does: filling out and completing the elements your eye is drawn to, in a subtle way. The score in Moon tends to be light and playful, lending a feeling of levity to a film that needs to be serious without taking itself too seriously.

Unfortunately, they seem to have spent so much effort getting the little things right through most of the body of the film that they ran out of steam at the end, which takes on a sort of hot-pursuit urgency that feels incongruous set against the rest of the film to that point. It’s also unfortunate that they tease us at the end with fading dialogue that gives an indication of what happens next - a philosophical debate something along the lines of what was seen in Contact or Minority Report. Moon is somewhere between the two - not as good as Contact, which was a nearly-perfect film; but much better than Minority Report, which was way too stylized and spent way too much time pretending to be Blade Runner (or else PKD stories are all the same).

Next: Catching up on every single movie we have ever played