Review: 'Moon'

I have never been fascinated by space travel. Sure, I wanted to be an astronaut when I was younger - but only because everyone else did. I imagined it to be similar to a pilot's job - hours upon hour of gnawing, grey tedium, suddenly and briefly punctuated by snippets of visceral, pant-wetting terror. All accompanied by vacuum-sealed beef bourgignon. The idea of being blasted in a tiny fire-farting rocket with two massive (and eminently flammable) fuel containers lashed to either side, towards a frozen airless sphere of rock, whilst wearing a Michelen Man suit, did not exactly fill me with awe and wonder. Plus, what would you do when you got up there? Wander about, play a bit of golf, collect some rocks, go for a dip in the Sea of Tranquility? That's not even enough activities to fill a sunny Bank Holiday, let alone a Massive Space Mission. Anyway, the long and short (though mostly long) of this preamble is that 'Moon' (dir. Duncan Jones, a.k.a. Zowie Bowie...) comes closer than any other film to portraying what I picture space to be like.

Filthy, bored and alone on a far-flung base on the dark side of the Moon, Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is coasting towards the end of his three-year contract with an enormo-profit energy company, who are somehow harvesting and using lunar minerals to generate power. With only a helper robot - GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey and given facial expressions by a series of emoticons) - for company, Sam is finding the last fortnight a little tedious to say the least. He also suspects he may be going slightly crackers - and who wouldn't, being stuck in a white box with Kevin Spacey for three years - or indeed any length of time? He begins to see things - figures on screens, girls in chairs, that sort of thing. Then, on a routine repair mission, Sam crashes his lunar rover and loses consciousness. GERTY wakes him up back on the station, but it quickly becomes apparent that all is not what it seems. And indeed, when Sam breaks orders to investigate the crash site, he finds a body inside the vehicle - it, too, is Sam Bell.

What follows is, well, hard to follow. The two clones form an uneasy comradeship, neither entirely sure who the 'real' Sam Bell is, and both detremined to find out. Over the course of the film, one Sam deteriorates dramatically; it is implied that he is suffering brain damage; whilst the other walks around in new uniform, boxing, skipping etc. Their relationship is built nicely, with both men gradually coming to accept a truth which is unfurled plausibly (well...) towards the end; though much is still left to the viewer's discretion.

'Moon' owes an obvious debt to '2001: A Space Odyssey'. GERTY is the vocal spit of HAL, albeit slightly less mechanically malevolent, and the visuals are pleasingly lo-fi and CGI-free. However, unlike '2001...', there is no gosh-wow-isn't-space-big moment here: everything unfolds on a deliberately small scale; the drama, although it occurs in space, is intensely human. The only place Sam wants to boldly go is home to his family. The simple visual style makes a refreshing change from recent sc-fi thrillers (the recent 'Star Trek' relying far too heavily on computer effects, ironically enough), and the storyline is absorbing without tipping over into ridiculousness. Rockwell is fantastic as both Sam Bells, and whilst the film may be lacking an iconic moment to remember it by, it deserves a high placing in the end-of-year lists. A space oddity, in a very good way.

(9/10)