Moon (2009)

Growing up in the 1960s, I was fascinated by the space program and the goal President Kennedy had set of man reaching the moon by the end of the decade. I remember having a poster in my room illustrating the flight path of an Apollo mission. I had a toy Saturn V rocket and a toy lunar module. And, of course, I was glued to the television coverage, especially during Apollo 11. Outer space was getting closer to us, and the culture of the times reflected that. In 1968, Charlton Heston–always a cinematic hero–played an astronaut in Planet of the Apes. That same year, Stanley Kubrick expanded minds and the art of cinema with 2001: A Space Odyssey. And not long after, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took their stroll on the moon in July of 1969, and a young British musician named David Bowie released his first hit record, “Space Oddity.”

For the 40th anniversary of the historic Apollo 11 mission — plus the recent passing of a prominent voice of the space program and the era, Walter Cronkite — there have been many retrospectives and tributes. One intriguing homage to that event and its times comes from David Bowie’s son Duncan Jones, who has directed a little film simply titled Moon. Made on a relatively paltry $5 million budget, Moon looks impressive in its use of miniatures and visual effects, including opening credits that appear to be three-dimensional objects within the scenery. Even more impressive is the film’s obvious homages to 2001 and other science fiction films which followed, especially the 1972 classic Silent Running. That film was predicated on ecological disaster on Earth, forcing the world’s plant life to be stored in giant bio-domes out in space; similarly but more optimistically in Moon, the potential disasters of energy production and consumption have been averted in the mid-21st century by harvesting the rocks and soil on the far side of the moon for Helium-3. In Silent Running, ecologist Bruce Dern goes renegade with a bio-dome, aided by three small robotic drones he nicknames Huey, Dewey, and Louie. In Moon, the heavy work is done by four giant unmanned harvesters nicknamed Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, all supervised by just one man — Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), an astronaut on a three-year contract assignment.

Sam just has a few weeks left on his contract, and with only old sitcom reruns and an autonomous computer named GERTY for company, he’s anxious to return to Earth and to his wife and daughter. But after Sam has a mysterious accident in a lunar rover while checking a harvester, he awakens in the infirmary back inside the main station. GERTY is suddenly “under orders” not to let Sam go outside, and tells him a repair team is on the way to the base. When Sam finally manages to return to the harvester, he finds the lunar rover crashed into it — and Sam is somehow still inside! So either Sam apparently rescues himself, or his twin…or he’s going crazy.

Beyond the story details in parallel with Silent Running, Moon pays homage to that film and 2001 in the art direction of the base station, with its white paneled walls, octagonal hatches, and bold lettering. Like the latter film’s infamous HAL 9000 computer, GERTY is omnipresent at the station and has a soothing, generally emotionless voice, but rather than HAL’s single blue eye set in a wall panel, GERTY’s presence is primarily manifested by a large, chunky ball of machinery that glides around suspended from the ceiling, often festooned with sticky notes, Sam’s coffee mug, and a 1970s-era smiley face display that reflects GERTY’s “feelings” at the moment. As the film progresses deeper into the mysteries surrounding the two Sams, other science fiction classics are hinted at and spring to mind, including Alien and Outland; the ending also reminded me of the obscure 1982 Klaus Kinski film Android.

These references are fun to observe, but the film can’t sustain itself on homage alone; it helps to have a thoughtful script and great acting, and Moon has both. The mysteries within the story occasionally seem to be weakly resolved, or not at all, and the last moment of the film feels a tad clumsy to me. However, this movie is driven more by character than plot, and the thoughts and emotions of Sam and his double’s identity crisis are communicated eloquently throughout thanks to the script, and, more importantly, the acting prowess of Sam Rockwell. One of the consistently finest actors working today, Rockwell adds another impressive performance to his career. He’s always adept at honest emotion in his portrayals, and he really gets to show off his range here. One scene when he sits in the rover looking in frustration at the Earth, near but yet so far away from him, is especially touching, and his scenes acting opposite himself, particularly when the two Sams square off across a ping-pong table, are fascinating and reminiscent of the subtleties Jeremy Irons displayed when he played twins in Dead Ringers. Even trickier, and to Rockwell’s credit, he carries the bulk of this movie by himself, having only brief moments with any supporting cast apart from GERTY, who is perfectly voiced by Kevin Spacey with just barely enough emotion, as Douglas Rain did the voice of HAL.

As the nostalgia peaks for our nation’s race to the moon, and as speculation rises about the future of space travel, it’s good to have Moon remind us of both our spacegoing and cinematic pasts, to appreciate the tremendous talent of our present, and to offer yet another vision of a hopeful future.