Moon (2009)

 

100 best Science Fiction Movies, Empire Magazine list

 

#91. Moon (2009)

 

This was the auspicious feature debut for Director Duncan Jones (also responsible for the original story) and Screenwriter Nathan Parker, both less-than forty-years-old. The men had special opportunities available to them, but also risked the dangers of public ridicule, for the same reason: their famous fathers. Jones’ father was Rock Super-Star David Bowie and Parker’s dad was multiple-Oscar-winning Director Alan Parker.

 

Jones and Parker further set the bar high for themselves when they went out to make a low-budget SF film ($5 million) that would be as FX reliant as a big-budget one, choosing a slow-burn style for its suspense, and infusing it with SF ideas complex and strange enough to restrict its release to art houses, creating an obvious challenge to finding an audience. The resulting product, though it barely made a profit, was critically hailed and impressed the SF community enough that it beat James Cameron’s enormously more expensive, heavily promoted, and popular, “Avatar,” for that years Hugo Award.

 

It's set in a Near Future wherein the Energy Crisis has been solved, but gives us few images of the cleaner, happier, World that resulted. Instead, it is set entirely on the barren Moon, where the prosperity of humanity is dependent on a Mining Operation run entirely by one man, Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell). The film focuses on the psychological pressures he endures because of his isolation as he nears the end of his three-year contract. Other than glitch-filled messages from his family on Earth (Dominique McElligott and Kaya Scodelario), his only companion is an advanced AI, Gertie (voiced by Kevin Spacey), which deliberately evokes the murderous HAL (voiced by Douglas Rains) from “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968), though Gertie eventually demonstrates greater integrity and compassion than the faceless majority of humanity, whose big ambitions have blinded them to the consequentialism inflicted on the individual. 

 

Sam is both mentally and physically deteriorating when he finally gets into a near-fatal accident with his Moon Buggy. After the accident, he finds he’s no longer alone, he now has a Doppelganger (again, obviously, Rockwell). They don’t go to war with each other, as is often the case in Doppelganger films, but work together to solve the mystery, and then cooperate to earn back a little justice even though they both face impossible odds. Without giving too much away, this is a Dystopian nightmare in a non-Dystopian setting, the closest comparison I can think of is Ursula Le Guin’s classic short-story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (first published 1973) in which we are presented with a Utopian city, then informed that the good life enjoyed by the many must be paid for by the misery of someone. Here, the rebellion committed by the lead characters isn’t really an attempt to over-throw of an unjust system, but it is still a defiance of the idea that anyone should be forced into paying for what they didn’t sign up for.

 

Jones wanted to evoke the type of science fiction films he grew up on, the films from the 1970s and early '80s, but not those that aped “Star Wars” (1976). He preferred those that loudly announced that their adventures also had intellectual and social implications, surely a noble ambition, though oddly, his film is far removed from most of the ones he most cites, “Silent Running” (1972), “Alien,” (1979), and “Outland” (1981). Of the three, only “Silent Running” had a plot that was wholly dependent on its SF ideas to function, the other two took more familiar tales and transformed them with as SF setting, exploring the implications of a new environment. “Alien” had a story-structure that borrowed heavily from Slasher movies like “Black Christmas” (1974) and was pitched to Producers as “‘Jaws’ [1975] in space,” both films that had no explicit fantastical elements. As for “Outland,” it was a quasi-remake of the classic Western “High Noon” (1951). Though both “Silent Running” and “Moon” we have tales that could’ve only be told as SF, “Moon” was by far the more sophisticated.

 

Though a number of plot elements are improbable from a technical standpoint, the fidelity to Real World Science was way better than average, and more importantly, the narrative is pitched to the SF literate; “Moon” displayed no fear of being too smart for the audience. Jones was interested in what a SF film could do that a more conventional fiction often struggles with or, as he said in an interview, the genre has a, "focus on what it is to be a human being, and about fundamental human questions." A more conventional drama, trapped in a more realistic context (especially fictions set in a contemporary context) defines humanity through moral choices growing out of those familiar situations. SF’s artificial contexts and situations can create a divergent mirroring through its “what ifs” that can lend more to an argument about the fundamental nature; an author evasive of SF tropes might be forced to engage is an essay or philosophical tract to explore the same territory so bluntly. "You take regular, believable human beings and then you put them in these alien environments, and by doing that, you actually make a human being in that environment even more visible. You know, you really see what it is that makes them tick."

 

The film triumphs for two primary reasons, it looks a thousand times better than its budget should’ve allowed and Rockwell’s performance in the dual lead.

 

Though not one of the films Jones cites most frequently, the film’s most obvious visual reference is Stanley Kubrick’s “2001 …” and as it happens, “Moon” was filmed on the self-same sound-stages. “2001…” was a pre-CGI film, and “Alien” was so early in CGI it might as well have been pre- as well, while Jones was experienced in the video-game industry before turning to narrative film, so one would’ve assumed he’d rely heavily on new tech, but no. Jones insists that there was, “less CG than you’d probably think …” the CGI was mostly to employed to remove wirework, added lens flares, dust plumes, extended the horizon, etc.

 

In a way, Jones was following in Kubrick’s footsteps by limiting his use of CGI. Back in the day, Kubrick turned his back on the more commonly-used Chroma Key technology, which could’ve made his life easier, by choosing in-camera and practical techniques like model miniatures against large sets gave him cleaner, sharper-looking images. Jones did the same, and went as far as to hire FX Specialists who had worked on "Silent Running" and Set Designer Bill Pearson who worked on both "Alien" and “Outland.”

 

The film’s reliance on in-camera effects has led its look to be compared to both “2001…” and the TV show “Space 1999” (first aired 1975). As Critic Phelim O'Neill put it, “The near-blanket use of CGI in movies such as the recent ‘Transformers’ [first film 2007] and ‘Terminator’ [first film 1984] sequels still provokes questions. Although now ‘how did they do that?’ has been replaced with ‘why did they bother?’"

 

Also, like Kubrick, Jones turned to cutting-edge speculations about our future in Space; he was inspired in part by the BBC Horizon episode “Moon for Sale” (first aired 2007) about the commercial exploitation of the Moon’s un-tapped Helium 3 resources, and basing the Lunar landscape on Apollo photos, enhanced by Michael Light for the book, “Full Moon” (1999).

 

Jones getting Rockwell to play Sam was a real coupe, because the role was, in fact, written for him (note how the Character name is similar to that of the Actor). Much of Sam’s character is defined by increasing, and mutating, desperations, first his deterioration, then the revelations of dark secrets, which would’ve encouraged many to over-play the part, but Rockwell shows restraint and nuance. The Character Sam is no loon, but instead a man of eroding stoicism, and Sam’s Doppelganger is in the same trap as Sam, though not as ill, and bonds with Sam because they share the same loyalties and victim of the same betrayals -- the two needed to be appreciably different, but far more the same than different.

 

Despite its limited financial returns, “Moon” brought Jones attention that served as the foundation for next three projects. “Source Code” (2011) was more respectably budgeted, and “Warcraft” (2016) was mega-budgeted, as was his fourth feature “Mute” (2018). “Mute” also included a scene that established it as a sorta sequel to this film, and the story then continued further with the graphic novel, “Madi: Once Upon A Time in The Future” (2020).

 

Trailer:

Moon | Official Trailer (2009) - YouTube