Moon
- Written by Nathan Parker
- Directed by Duncan Jones
- Starring Sam Rockwell and Kevin Spacey
- Classification: 14A
When Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon in July, 1969, he took one small step for man and one large step for the romantically declined. In the next decade, space travel replaced the French Foreign Legion as the preferred calling for moping lonely hearts.
Except for the gung ho Star Wars crew, film spacemen were suddenly a lonely breed: Robert Duvall's character in THX 1138 (1970), Bruce Dern's plant-watering loner in Silent Running (1971), the fantasy-prone cosmonaut in Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972), and David Bowie's morose alcoholic in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) all slept unhappily or alone.
Star trekkers fared little better in pop songs: Bowie's Major Tom in Space Oddity (1969), Elton John's Rocket Man (1972) and Harry Nilsson's Spaceman (1972) were all moony loners. Major Tom summed it up for all his dreamy, fatalistic colleagues when he complained, "Planet Earth is blue and there's nothing I can do."
British filmmaker Duncan Jones's new film Moon comes about its lunar melancholy honestly. Jones is the son of Major Tom, a.k.a. David Bowie. And he would have appeared to have inherited from dad, one of pop music's most adept mix-master blenders, an ability to synthesize and improve upon styles and ideas.
Watching Moon is kind of like seeing a booster rocket thrust seventies' sci-fi films deeper into orbit.
Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is the man on the moon - an astronaut sent to Our Big Night Light to man a helium-3 harvesting station. It's not a great job.
His only companion is a suspiciously attentive robot, Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey). Dinner comes in droopy plastic bags. His TV only plays old reruns ( Bewitched, Mary Tyler Moore ). And video messages from his wife back on Earth contain inexplicable edits.
Sam has another problem: He sees things. He imagines making love to his wife - a respectable, even commendable fantasy. But then one day, after finally shaking Gerty, he sneaks out of the space station and discovers a female ghost hovering over a mangled tractor. Inside, he finds another spaceman, bleeding and covered in soot. Sam wipes the man's clouded visor to discover his dying self.
That's a great plot twist - right up there with John Hurt's chest buster in Alien . Speaking of which, Moon borrows the idea of a skulking robot spy from Ridley Scott's film. The bit about the lonely astronaut fantasizing about his wife comes from Solaris . And Sam's being a lunar miner is a homage to the 1981 sci-fi film Outland , where Sean Connery blows the whistle on a corrupt mining manager on one of Jupiter's moons.
All of which would be useless trivia, if Jones wasn't able to organize and advance his inspirations into an original vision; something new under the moon, so to speak. Mission accomplished. Jones's feature debut is spookier - scarier intellectually - than virtually all previous sci-fi films. Humans here are dispensable contract workers. And robots are no better or worse than humans. Gerty, it turns out, is neither Sam's friend nor enemy, just something doing its job.
Alien was the first film to see spacemen as employees as opposed to explorers. But Jones's film is more worried about its regular-guy character. And for good reason. Whereas Alien offers up dinosaur-sized space lizards, the ghosts in the machines in Moon are ultimately more troubling, being man-made and bureaucratically ordained.
Sam Rockwell ( Confessions of a Dangerous Mind ) was an inspired choice to play the film's haunted hero. Sam doesn't have much to say. He watches, argues with himself occasionally and processes information. With his twitchy smile, piercing stare and hair gone wild with static electricity, Rockwell is all antennae, sweeping the lunar landscape for signs of trouble. He finds it, too. The poster for Close Encounters of the Third Kind , another great seventies' sci-fi probe, announced, "We are not alone."
The more troubling message here would seem to be: "We are all alone."
Special to The Globe and Mail