Duncan Jones, the son of a rock star who once claimed to be a space alien, has chosen the science-fiction genre for Moon, his debut film. Surprised? His dad, David Bowie, must have taken the lad to see 2001: A Space Odyssey. Stanley Kubrick fans will recognize the video-screen messages between an astronaut and his earthbound family, and the soothing voice of the spaceman's computer companion. The Bowies also must have sat through the enigmatic Russian film Solaris, a story of madness and the uncanny on a remote outpost of Earth. And as an adolescent, young Jones surely discovered Blade Runner, with its nefarious globe-girding corporation and the doubtful line between human and not human in a high-tech age.
Moonis light years behind its predecessors when measuring cinematic greatness, but, despite dissipating much of its suspense and drama, it works as a modestly engaging genre picture. Moon stars Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell, the one-man crew of a Lunar Industries mining station on the dark side of the moon. The largely automated facility is digging for helium-3, which, as a corporate underwriting happy-talk ad explains at the onset, has saved humanity from a new dark age by supplying 70% of the world's energy consumption.
Sam is counting the days until the end of his three-year contract. Unkempt and pale, he waters the plants, carves a model village from balsa wood and mutters to himself while padding around the grimy station, which resembles a college dorm and a grease pit. Voiced by Kevin Spacey (in one of his best roles in recent years), GERTY, cousin to Kubrick's HAL, is a solicitous, reassuring sounding board of reason amid the mind-numbing loneliness. "Sam? Is everything OK? You don't seem like yourself today," asks GERTY, thoughtfully.
The short answer is no, everything is not all right. The first sign of trouble is an inexplicable hallucination of a woman seated in a chair. And before long, Sam awakens to find another Sam inhabiting the mining station, a carbon copy of himself. Or is he the copy of the other? The two Sams have overlapping but not identical memories. Basically, they freak each other out.
Skillfully constructed within a modest budget, Moon depicts Earth's closest neighbor as a place of shadows, its pitted and cratered surface yawning up at the black, star-dusted infinity. Special effects are minimal but effective. Moon is not a splashy, computer-generated carnival ride, but theater in the round, a three-way conversation between a dissociated man and his friend, the computer.
