Before the review, here's what I'm up to with this. Just for the sheer fun of it I plan to do a blog entry every day during August. The chances are high that I will probably fail completely or put in some very short entries...
So anyway. "Moon". This is a tricky one to review because I don't want to give too much away about the plot, so I may have to talk about themes and styles and other artistic fripperies. For this, I apologise!
It's an unspecified time in the future. Earth has run out of energy but thankfully fusion power generation has been invented, requiring large amounts of the isotope Helium-3; rare on Earth, but more plentiful in the regolith of the Moon thanks to millenia of bombardment by the solar wind. Lunar Industries has built a base on the far side of the moon where robotic strip-mining harvesters churn through the regolith, extracting Helium-3 to be rocketed back to Earth. The base is pretty much automatic, but a single human worker spends three years at a time on-site to repair anything that the automatic systems cannot handle. His only companion is a boxy mobile computer system and - since a satellite in lunar orbit went down - time delayed messages from Earth relayed via Jupiter (as he is on the far side signals cannot get to him directly). Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is the current worker, bored into a state of almost Zen-like calm. His three years are nearly up, he is starting to see things, and then he crashes a lunar rover into a harvester because of an hallucination. Things get wierder when he regains consciousness back on the base.
Then the plot kicks in and I'll go no further...
This is an old fashioned SF film, and that's a good thing. At times it brings to mind 2001, Solaris (the original version) and Silent Running, along with small-screen SF such as Space:1999 - in fact, in many ways it has the feel of a season 1 Space:1999 episode, one of the Martin Landau single-hander ones when the cash got short. Don't expect fast-paced action, space battles, gigantic robots or big explosions; this is SF about ideas. It assumes certain technologies, assumes that humans will always behave like humans, and then projects forwards to see how humanity as a whole, massive corporations, and individual people will react in that situation.
For the SF fan, rather than the casual filmgoer, there is nothing really new here. I don't think any element of the story has not been seen before. However, it's refreshing to see some "hard" SF ideas on the big screen and handled with respect and seriousness. It's also refreshing to see SFX used to support a story rather than as a spectacle; given an aspect of the plot I can't mention it's fair to say that there's SFX used in probably 90% of the shots, but it's never "gee wizz".
It's also a film that isn't afraid to let the audience be smart. You'll probably work out what is going on before the protagonists do, but it doesn't matter. There isn't a big scene where what is going on is explained for those slower on the uptake. Indeed, the protagonists appear not to work out the whole story (the reason why, at the start, Sam Bell has started seeing things and why he gets ill later) - or maybe they don't mention it because it's not that important - despite being the reason why things are being done in the way that they are and hence the driving force of the film's plot.
As a debut feature-length film for the director (Duncan Jones; yes, he is, etc etc etc) it's massively impressive. Sam Rockwell is equally impressive. Given the tiny budget (reportedly $5 million) it must surely make it's money back at the very least. But given that it's many, many times better than some of this summer's alleged SF films (Transformers 2, anyone?) it deserves to make so much more.
If you fancy a bit of thinking rather than just some mindless explosionfest, go see "Moon". Show Hollywood that we're not just in it for rapid-cutting, loud yelling, and over-flashy CGI... please?
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