Moon

Moon is an imaginative space sci-fi thriller that won’t ever have anything more than a cult following. Which is really too bad because it deserves a little more credit than that. A little more.

Moon starts off with Sam Rockwell playing an astronaut, Sam Bell, who is working on a 3 year mining contract on the moon. The company he works for is gathering resources from the moon that provides Earth with valuable power resources. Sam is there alone with only his computer named GERTY whose voice is eerily done by Kevin Spacey.

It would be impossible to not compare this film with Stanley Kubrick’s classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The computer GERTY is very familiar to that of the intelligent computer HAL which is found in Kubrick’s film. There is also a scene near the beginning that has a shot of the earth with classical music in the background, which was perhaps director Duncan Jones’s not so subtle way of showing respect for 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I have to give Rockwell credit in that he basically had no human supporting actor throughout the entire movie, in that sense it’s sort of similar to Tom Hank’s performance in Cast Away. However, there were a few times in Moon where I thought the acting got a little awkward which is hard to explain without spoiling the movie.

It’s a beautifully depressing independent film that you don’t need to be a regular fan of the genre to enjoy, but you will have to be in the right mood to fully appreciate it.