Moon (2009)
“Pretty Good”
In the not-too-distant future, most of our energy needs are met by a harvesting operation on the moon. It’s a job largely performed by automated machinery, but for one lone (and lonely) human being. This time out, it’s Sam Bell (convincingly played by Sam Rockwell). Despite his “astronaut” job title, it’s quickly clear that Sam is just a grunt… doing manual labor with little mental stimulation. His only companion is GERTY, the highly mobile computer that functions as the brains of the operation (voiced well by Kevin Spacey).
After three long years, Sam is finally anticipating going home to his wife and child. As he prepares to hand off his duties to his yet-to-arrive replacement, he begins to experience some mighty strange things. Is he just going stir-crazy, or is something more sinister afoot? Soon, Sam begins to suspect the latter and that the mega-corporation that employs him, LUNAR (which seems a lot like many big companies of today), may be behind it. Hell, just the fact that they’d send a man off to spend three years alone on the moon was enough to convince me of their evil ways!
Moon was an official selection at Sundance, which I find a bit of a hit or miss proposition. Sometimes, those films are just too arty for their own good. Not this time. I found the movie well (if mostly slow) paced, and the characters (even GERTY) quite relatable. A real feeling of loneliness and despair permeates the film, closely mirroring the inner workings of Sam’s mind. His efforts to make a friend of his hallucination/nemesis is a telling sign of his desperate need for human contact. The action picks up near the end, as Sam searches for the truth. Are his efforts in vain? Will he ever get home? I’m certainly not going to tell… what kind of reviewer do you think I am?
silvershamrock.wordpress.com 