July 2009
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Moon (15)
Printed 15th July 2009

Space. The final frontier. This is the thought-provoking (almost) one-man show musing on what it means to be human. Its mission: to bring intelligent sci-fi to your big screen like back in the 70s heyday of humans-in-space stories. To boldly go where sci-fi doesn’t very often anymore.

Riffing on themes presented in its philosophical sci-fi inspirations (2001/Solaris/Silent Running), Moon is the singular story of spaceman Sam Bell (a simply remarkable Sam Rockwell), a Lunar Industries employee living on the far side of the moon where he mines for Earth’s latest source of energy, Helium-3. Towards the tail end of a long three-year solo stint, Sam is starting to suffer from isolation sickness thanks to a broken satellite preventing any live communications with Earth and his only company being the single-minded, smiley-faced computer assistant Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey).

To make matters worse his health has suddenly started deteriorating and he is also beginning to experience lucid hallucinations. With only two weeks to go before he is relieved from his three-year contract and transported back to Earth, to be psychologically unhinged and put his return at risk is about the worst thing that could happen to him. Or so he would think...

To say much more about the plot would be detrimental to the enjoyment of this mysterious and gripping viewing experience, as Sam’s world as he knows it comes crashing down around him. What you can say is that this is a stimulating, provocative and existential cerebral sci-fi that touches on such stratospheric-brow subjects as alienation, paranoia, scientific ethics, corporate greed and, most importantly, what exactly it means to be human.

Directed with a sense of stillness by debut filmmaker Duncan “Zowie Bowie” Jones, Moon eschews the fast-paced editing style du jour in favour of a more languid, time-taking, slow burn aesthetic to better reveal the mystery at the centre of this psychological thriller. Perfectly-suited to the material, inside the space station we take in in long static takes the acting-par-excellence from Rockwell and follow his spiritual journey in the stars. Outside the station, on the surface of the big cheese, the paltry $5 million dollar budget is pushed to its limit as the Cinesite effects-team create beautiful, lo-fi, 80s Aliens-style space effects and miniatures that has a charm to it that modern CGI just can’t replicate.

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