Great Sci-Fi is hard to come by. Not the ideas – there are tons of those: Replicants, grinding humans into food, an infertility epidemic, forbidden books, the list goes on. But great Sci-Fi execution is a rare, always appreciated commodity. Children of Men and Sunshine are two recent standouts. With Moon, we now have the third. And two men to thank for it.
Duncan Jones, a.k.a. Zowie Bowie, son of David, shows a galaxy’s worth of promise in his debut feature. His is an eye trained by the classics of the genre. His is an aesthetic collected from Silent Running’s solitude, 2001’s pensiveness, and Tarkovsky’s deliberate pacing. He’s familiar enough with the genre to know that it all hinges, not on the otherworldly premise, but on the lone protagonist forced to endure it. Deckard. Neville. Montag. We should add Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) to this club. He’s spent three years alone on the moon, making sure the sun’s power is harvested for an energy-starved Earth. His conversation options are lacking: His wife sends her love through pre-recorded messages. His robot helper GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey) brings a decidedly mechanical touch to the proceedings. When those aren’t enough, Sam can only talk to himself. I won’t be spoiling the film if I tell you that Sam spends much of the movie actually talking to himself.
And now to the second man we should thank, Sam Rockwell. One of the best and most underappreciated actors of his time, Rockwell gives what might be the finest performance of his career. Acting alone is tough enough, but acting so well alone is a feat in itself. Sometimes melancholy, other times exuberant, and always tragic, Rockwell makes this as captivating a one-man show as you’ve seen this decade. And how difficult it must have been, working under the tight constraints demanded by the dual nature of his performance. The greatest testament to Jones’ talent is his ability to make Sam’s scenes with himself always feel real; to direct and frame Rockwell’s activity in a way always aware of the cinematic tricks on display, but rarely gloating at how great of a job they’ve done. I say rarely only because of a ping-pong scene later in the film. How Jones and his team pulled that off is beyond me. I suppose they want me to feel like that.
Visually, Moon is simply striking. Thankfully light on CGI, Jones’ film utilizes fantastic miniatures to envision what a mining operation on the moon’s surface would look like, though there are several occasions where the miniatures look a bit clunky or clearly artificial. I like to think this isn’t a mistake or laziness, but a conscious nod to Moon’s predecessors: the films that struggled to create the future without the futuristic technology we have today. Where spaceships hanging from strings, practical makeup effects and process screens were the order of the day, not tennis balls on sticks. Decades ago, a matte line made it all too clear that Tatsuya Nakadai’s dual performance in Kagemusha was pieced together in the editing room. Now, in the future, Rockwell can wrestle with himself (literally) without the film missing a beat. Moon, low on budget but high on talent, is a testament to how far the genre has come, and how far it will go.
But the atmosphere hasn’t changed much since the glory days of Solaris. With beautiful, empty, eerie set design and a moody, chilling score by Clint Mansell, it becomes all too easy to understand how a man could lose himself up there, somewhere between the medically white walls and the endless, icy surface looming outside. Most of cinema’s spaceships, I’ve found, feel claustrophobic not because they lack space, but because they are all the space our protagonist has. With all that room, and all that time, Sam has no choice but to think – about his life back on Earth, the two weeks before his departure, the health of his plants, how alone he really is. But, as the genre has taught us to expect, Sam soon learns that he is not alone. And he has only himself to thank for that.
Clarence Hammond
© Cinephile Magazine, 2009