Review: Moon

I like the many layers of Moon. Are they literally talking about the moon, or is the title a veiled reference to Sam Rockwell's buttocks? The answer may surprise you!

What?

To be honest, Moon is a tough movie to review. Not because it's bad, in any way, but because it's hard to talk about the movie without giving away major plot points. So, trying to be as vague as possible...

In Moon, Sam Rockwell plays astronaut Sam Bell, living in isolation in a base on the far side of the moon. Sam's nearing the end of a three-year contract to watch the base's automated systems as they mine for a newly discovered form of green energy harvested from moon rock. His only company is the base's AI, Gerty, voiced by Kevin Spacey, and the occasional recorded message from his wife and young daughter on Earth - his only human contact since the live satellite link was lost. With two weeks left to go before he returns home, Sam's mental state's deteriorating and starts to have disturbing hallucinations. But are they really symptoms of cabin fever or isn't he as alone as he's always believed?

With last year's Star Trek seeing a return to the big screen sci-fi, Moon also marks a return - not to the flashy, explosive sci-fi, but the quieter, more cerebral works like The Man Who Fell To Earth (not surprising, perhaps, considering it was directed by David Bowie's son), Blade Runner or Silent Running. The basic setup's not anything we haven't seen before - but the movie takes jumble of familiar elements and magics up something original. It certainly echoes Kubrick - both The Shining and 2001: A Space Odyssey - with a slow build which increases the skin-crawling tension and Gerty echoing HAL in more than one way - Spacey's emotionless delivery making the robot genuinely creepy and the emoticons that serve as Gerty's way of expressing him(its)self sinister rather than endearing. But it's no doppelgänger.

That's part of the movie's greatest success - it doesn't try to be all shiny otherworldliness, but familiar - the lived-in details of the moonbase, from furry dice in the endearingly clunky moon rover, the run down, industrial stylings, baked beans for breakfast, the alarm clock that wakes Sam to the strains of Chesney Hawkes each morning - all of these things make the exotic familiar. It's a theme that runs over into the characterisation too - Sam's an everyman, finding little, human ways to make his isolation more bearable.

The fact that Rockwell wasn't Oscar nominated is a matter of disappointment to me - the Academy clearly more distracted by the rich visuals of Avatar rather than a real, human performance. Rockwell carries the movie as, for most intents and purposes, the only human on-screen, delivering an affecting and credible portrayal of the loner yearning for home, with later plot developments allowing him to show different facets to the character. It's a deeply affecting one-man show and Rockwell puts a human face to the hefty themes of memory, alienation, identity and what makes a person.

It's a refreshing blast of old-school, sci-fi, at once familiar, but original, held together by a brilliant performance by Sam Rockwell, doing amazing things with its limited $5m budget and looking fantastic with its mundane, utterly convincing industrial stylings. It promises great things to come from Zowie Bowie, or rather, Duncan Jones, as he now goes by.

Oh, and bonus points for the blink-and-you-miss-it cameo by Matt Berry.