Moon (2009)

Moon was co-written and directed by Duncan Jones (or Zowie Bowie, as his not-in-any-way-under-the-influence father David originally named him), and produced by Sting's wife Trudie Styler, but there is nothing rock and roll about this cult classic-to be. (Unless you count Chesney Hawkes's "I Am The One And Only" blaring out of an alarm clock at various stages - a cruel and unusual wake up call, to be sure, but a cute touch by Jones for reasons that soon become clear.)

Instead, it’s a thoughtful, introverted character piece with only one character - well, one human character and a robot. Well, a robot and two human characters who are in fact the same person... It’s that kind of film.

Sam Bell, played by the mighty Sam Rockwell, is an employee of Lunar Industries, mining moon rocks containing solar power (Earth’s main source of energy in the future the film depicts) on a three year contract that has almost run its course. He sends and receives pre-recorded messages to his wife back on Earth, he communicates with his corporate bosses, but other than that he’s been alone the whole time, except for a sentient robot called Gerty.

As he readily admits, he’s beginning to get a bit flaky. However, talking to plants and seeing phantom girls in your favourite armchair is one thing; waking up one day to find another actual person walking around wearing your slippers is quite another, especially if that other person is you. From this point on the film alternates between each Sam's points of view, and the question is soon asked: which is the real Sam Bell?



Like a lot of the best science fiction, Moon is less concerned with the world it has created than it is with those who inhabit it, and, while the moon base set is impressive in it’s minimalist, functional realism, and the lunar landscape itself realised through good, old-fashioned and - you should pardon the pun - earthy models, as opposed to CGI, the story is more about Sam Bell and his inner turmoil than it is with any of those trappings. It could have taken place miles under the ocean, for instance - it would have been a lesser film, but the story would still have worked.

At its heart the film is about simple human desire for redemption. At one point, Sam tells Gerty that his wife had left him prior to his arrival on the Moon, only to give him a second chance. He admits he has done wrong, but avoids specifics, as if he cannot bring himself to talk about them, even after three years of contemplation.

In a key scene, it’s implied that he may have been violent: the brooding, intense "new" Sam - as we shall call him for the purposes of this article - instigates a tussle with the other. When he injures him, new Sam reacts in shock, as if unable to comprehend what he has done - an echo, perhaps, of a similar reaction in the past. It is telling too that, before the standoff escalates into violence, he insists the old Sam put down a knife he had innocently been using to whittle a model, as if he knows what they are both capable of.

But he’s wrong about that. The original Sam is a vastly different person now, as expertly symbolised in something as simple as their respective exercise regimes: for new Sam it’s a punch bag and skipping rope, the tools of a boxer, a fighter... but we only ever see old Sam on a treadmill.

This difference is even more starkly revealed in the physical deterioration that the first Sam begins to undergo, alongside the mental disintegration that is arguably already underway in the film‘s opening minutes; even as his spiritual and emotional rejuvenation comes to an end, his body itself starts to disintegrate, placing in jeopardy his capacity to ever experience that which his transformation was necessary to obtain: a reunion with his wife and child, who he has never met.

Sam Rockwell is great in the dual role. His career has taken a strange trajectory: his first brush with widespread critical acclaim was in 1997’s Lawn Dogs; then George Clooney fought Miramax tooth and nail to cast Rockwell in his directorial debut, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, which should have made him a star. But despite delivering a superb, tightly-wound performance as real life Gong Show host and serial bullshit-artist Chuck Barris, that never quite came to pass, and Rockwell has instead settled pleasingly into a pattern of character actor (and often the best thing on show) in high-profile pics like The Green Mile and Frost/Nixon, interspersed with leads in small-scale indies that take his interest (Moon was in fact written specifically with the actor in mind).

And here he is presented with what is surely the ultimate acting challenge: carrying an entire film with nothing but props and stand-ins to bounce off and react to, and never once allowing phrases such as “split-screen” or “trick photography” to enter the audiences mind. What’s more, the two Sams may be poles apart in terms of temperament and character development but they are still intrinsically the same person, and he never lets us forget that. It’s a performance imbued with tortured nuance and impotent bluster in equal measure, and in any kind of fair world Rockwell would have been battling it out with District 9’s Sharlto Copley for the 2010 best actor Oscar (Jeff Bridges having already won his for The Big Lebowski).

(A word here about Kevin Spacey, who provides the voice of Gerty the robot - as a sentient computer programme charged with the safety of a human counterpart, the similarities between Gerty and 2001’s HAL are obvious and inevitable, and Jones realises this; far from a piece of billboard-pleasing stunt-casting, using Spacey to articulate Gerty cleverly plays to audiences expectations - if the thing sounds like both John Doe and Keyser Soze, of course it’s gonna be malevolent.)

But it’s not the robot or the moon buggies or the lunar landscape that carry Moon over the line into territory populated with excellent, humanist science fiction debuts such as Primer and Pi; it’s the premise of a man prepared to accept responsibility for past mistakes, to atone for them in the only way he knows - by penance, by committing to a purgatory amongst the stars just a floor or two below Heaven - only to find that with redemption does not necessarily come salvation...

At least, not for both versions of yourself. I'm pretty sure this is a message unique to Moon, so catch it if you can.