Moon
Director: Duncan Jones
Writers: Story by Duncan Jones, Screenplay by Nathan Parker
Producers: Stuart Fenegan, Trudie Styler
Stars: Sam Rockwell, Dominique McElligott, Robin Chalk, and featuring the vocal talents of Kevin Spacey


Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is a good employee. A little informal, a little temperamental, but he’s dedicated and mechanically-versatile. He copes better with solitude than the average person. You could say he’s uniquely-suited for his challenging job, the lone human aboard a mining station on the dark side of the moon. Even if the giant harvesters collecting fusion super-ingredient Helium-3 are totally automated, and much of the station’s functions are controlled by a relatively-intelligent robot that answers to Gerty (Kevin Spacey, as only he can, voices the semi-mobile computer in tones that are both reassuring and bloodless); unpredictable things happen. That’s entropy – no matter how well-designed your system, chaos gradually creeps in. You need someone who can think on their feet to keep the lucrative product coming.

But even a good employee like Sam Bell can’t do the job forever; he’s been at it for three years, and it’s not polite to say but he’s looking a little pale and wiggy. He’s seeing things out of the corner of his eye and talking to the plants. Moon is a movie about Sam Bell, and the end of his three-year contract, and the less I tell you about what happens the better, except to say that few actors this year will work as hard, and with such mental/emotional dexterity, as Sam Rockwell does in this movie. And also that it was such a rare and happy thrill to be watching a movie where there was no obviously inevitable conclusion. The situation it creates is so ethically novel, so despairingly strange, as to totally lack a “correct” solution under the circumstances. Scene after scene is alive because it is impossible to predict, co-writer/director Deacon Jones has imagined a scenario which is fantastical, but also perfectly logical, if you understand systems and entropy, and corporate bottom-line reasoning on an interstellar body with no particular laws.

I don’t know if you call this a dark comedy, a low-key cerebral thriller, or a meditation. But by being some of each of these things, it is great science-fiction. Rather than just dazzling your senses it wants to poke at that part of your brain that contains your definitions of humanity and human life. Remember when Blade Runner did that? And Dark City? If the thoughts inspired by this movie are the type that keep Deacon Jones awake at night, I want to see more movies made by him, very soon.

This is not a visual extravaganza like those examples were, it was produced on a startlingly low budget, and part of its integrity to theme is how mundane it appears. Sam’s world is one of pre-packaged meals and procedures whose authors probably prided themselves on being idiot-proof. Gerty, despite its vocabulary, expresses itself with a klutzy screen that shows smiley-face emoticons – I like the doubtful one.

Most of Sam’s days are devoted to staving off boredom – he practices ping-pong, carves models of his hometown, records messages to his wife (Dominique McElligott) and daughter. Her replies indicate their relationship has changed much during his tenure. He has no live connection to Earth; Gerty blames a damaged relay satellite.

We’ll get to see in a unique way just how three years out here changes him from the man he was at the beginning. It could be that going a little insane was good for him. He needs the agility created by insanity following the repercussions of an accident out on the lunar surface. This could have simply been a gimmick, and leads to the application of a package of visual tricks which have served as a gimmick in many movies before. But by staying true to the rules he has established, and by staying true to the character of Sam Bell, Jones surmounts the gimmickry and makes it disappear behind a rich tapestry of inspiration. Rockwell’s great talents are indispensible to this, as is an actor named Robin Chalk, whose face you will never see and whose body you likely won’t even realize was on-screen – but if he did not do the job assigned him, this particular system could have collapsed under its own precociousness.

This is a movie about systems, and about the human gift for re-writing and transcending them. There are imaginings a human mind can leap to that a computer can’t, so Sam makes an important discovery during his plight – Gerty’s root function is to help Sam. And the fact is that while they find themselves in a situation beyond Gerty’s limited philosophy, Gerty will still help Sam. He’s no WALL-E, but he’s no HAL, either.

The only sour note struck in Moon, otherwise one of the best films so far released in 2009, comes from a too-insistent musical score by Clint Mansell (Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler). So much of this movie’s integrity comes from how it projects big ideas through small behavior; the music does not match the latter but too-thickly underlines the former. Sam Bell does not go overwrought when confronted with a true understanding of his job and his purpose – he might try to avoid the problem, or sulk about it, or spite it in a half-dozen ways, but he does not cry out to the Gods. He’s a man in a puzzle, and he doesn’t confront it heroically but methods his way through it with a combination of stubborn moods, quirky intuition, and a unique opportunity to make different aspects of his personality cooperate.

That feels right. Heroes don’t apply for jobs like this. People like Sam do.