Moon

This evening we watched a 2009 British science fiction drama, Moon, directed by Duncan Jones. The director, who went on to make the intriguing Source Code, was once known primarily for being David Bowie’s son but now, with two excellent films under his belt, surely deserves to be recognised in his own right. Moon is a clever film in several respects. It was clearly made on a relative shoe string and the script written to reduce the number of actors to a minimum. It is also in part a sort of hommage to such films as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Solaris. Sam Bell (played by Sam Rockwell), working alone on a lunar mining base with only a computer (GERTY, voiced by Kevin Spacey) for company, is coming to the end of his three year tour of duty. He starts to hallucinate and crashes his rover. He awakes back in the base and overhears the computer being given instructions not to let him out of the base. The suspicious Bell finds a way out and drives out to the wreck of the rover. Inside is the injured Bell. If I write any more I’ll give the game away. Like The Prestige, Moon manipulates its audience into making an erroneous assumption and then gradually reveals the error. In its treatment of concepts such as mortality and man’s future need for dispensable intelligent labour, it also rather reminded me of a short story, Garden of Eden.